Chapter 13
Part 13 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From Books and Persons by Arnold Bennett. The Evening Standard. 23rd of June, 1927.
Last week I discussed some recent reading in verse. I will now mention some new fiction for which I then had no room. I must begin by saying that, as regards fiction, I exist in a state of excited suspense, waiting in hope and apprehension for Galleon's Reach, the first novel of H.M. Tomlinson. Tomlinson, as some have been for years aware, is a great prose writer.
He is, to use a convenient but of course misleading description, an English Conrad. I have been hearing about this novel for a long time and at last I hear that it is being printed. It is certain to contain exceedingly fine work. It may be an exceedingly fine novel, none can tell. For those to whom English literature matters, the moment is anxious.
While impatiently attending Tomlinson, I have read a bunch of novels. I must say, despite my notorious grave reservations concerning Virginia Woolf, that the most original of the bunch is To the Lighthouse, Hogarth Press. It is the best book of hers that I know. Her character drawing has improved.
Mrs. Ramsey almost amounts to a complete person. Unfortunately she goes and dies and her decease cuts the book in two. Although there are some pleasing records of interesting sensations outside the range of the ordinary novelist. The scheme of the story is rather willful, designed seemingly, but perhaps not really, to exhibit virtuosity. A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse.
At the end some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat. That is the externality of the plot. The middle part, entitled Time Passes, shows a novel device to give the reader the impression of the passing of time, a sort of cataloguing of intermediate events. In my opinion it does not succeed.
It is a shortcut, but a shortcut that does not get you anywhere. To convey the idea of passage of a considerable length of time is an extremely difficult business, and I doubt if it can be accomplished by means of a device. It is the device of simply saying, Time Passes, and leaving the effortive imagination to the reader. Apart from this honest shirking of the difficulty, there is no alternative but to convey the
impression very gradually without any direct insistence in the manner of life itself. I have heard a good deal about the wonders of Mrs. Wolfe's style. She sometimes discovers a truly brilliant simile. She often chooses her adjectives and adverbs with beautiful felicity. But there is more in style than this.
The form of her sentences is rather triingly monotonous, and the distance between her nominatives and her verbs is steadily increasing. Still, To the Lighthouse has stuff in it strong enough to withstand quite a lot of adverse criticism. End of part 13 Thank you for watching!
