Chapter 18
18. Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Nothing is Simply One Thing. Virginia Woolf's Surprising New Story by Lydia Languish. From John O'London's Weekly. 11th June 1927. Realities is always an ingredient of Mrs. Woolf's work. In the presentation of facts, in punctuation, in parentheses, she is a law unto herself. This lends to any book by her
a certain excitement. One knows before one begins that her realities will be mysterious and her mystery is real. To the lighthouse is no exception. Her lighthouse, for instance, is a real object. Stark and straight, barred with black and white, windows in it, washing spread on the rocks to dry. But it is more essentially a spiritual goal never reached until all the youthful glamour of it had faded for the boy James Ramsey. The Ramses were
a remarkable family, rotating almost without knowing it round the personality of Mrs. Ramsey, who was a mother of eight children, still more definitely the wife of her vain, irascible, yet lovable husband, but most of all, unassailably, Mrs. Ramsey herself. The Beautiful Mother. Mr. Tansley, one of those tiresome people whose snobbery takes the form of telling everyone how lowly-born they are, was a guest at the cottage in Skye
where the Ramses spent their summers. Because nobody liked him, Mrs. Ramsey took him to town with her when she went shopping and he made the discovery that this woman of fifty, the mother of eight children, was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. He took her bag and, seeing a man digging a drain, paused to look at her. He knew for the first time in his life the extraordinary pride of walking with a beautiful woman. Between Mrs.
Ramsey and her youngest child James, a great sympathy existed. They were comfortable together. With Mr. Ramsey, nobody was ever comfortable. Even Lily Briscoe, the determined spinster and completely inefficient artist who was in love with the whole family, was obliged to excuse him in her own mind by thinking that a man whose life-study was subject and object and the nature of reality could not be judged like an ordinary person. He was
petty, selfish, vain, egotistical, a tyrant who wore his wife to death, but he had a fiery unworldliness. Will it be fine tomorrow? The family and their two or three guests are all astoundingly alive although the comedy in which their parts are cast has little more substance than the simple question will it be fine tomorrow? The attitude of his elders towards the meteorological situation
stamps James's opinion of their characters for all time. Mrs. Ramsey, for James's sake, saw no reason why it shouldn't be. Mr. Ramsey was certain that it won't and the disagreeable Mr. Tansley rubbed it in. The pessimists had it and when finally it was settled that another picnic had succumbed to the British climate, one has reached the middle of the book. For a few pages one fears that something more precious has gone with it. A brief intimation
in parenthesis that Mrs. Ramsey had died suddenly the night before threatens to cut the thread which has hitherto held one spellbound. But with her peculiar power of investing the commonplace with subtleties Mrs. Wolfe rearrests attention from a different quarter. Mrs. Ramsey dead, two of her children dead also, the charwoman got orders to prepare the house for the family's return. There is something reminiscent of the desolate habitation to which Mary Rose
returned in the house in Skye as Mrs. McNabb the charwoman saw it. This had been the nursery. Why, it was all damp in here, the plaster was falling, and the rats in all the attics. The rain came in, but they never sent, never came. Some of the looks had gone, so the door spanked. She didn't like to be up here at dusk alone neither, it was too much for one woman, too much, too much. She creaked, she moaned, she banged the door, she turned the
key in the lock, and left the house shut up, locked alone. The return of Mrs. Ramsey. But now the family was coming back. Before any of them Mrs. Ramsey came. It seems she has always been there. No one noticed her except Lily Briscoe the artist and determined spinster. Even she was at first inclined to consider Mrs. Ramsey as faded and gone, but when she set up her easel on the lawn to try to recapture a certain
vista of which the central point had been Mrs. Ramsey and James, she was struck painfully by the emptiness of the drawing room steps. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hullowness, a strain.
Oh, Mrs. Ramsey! she called out silently, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then, having gone, come back again. Then whilst Mr. Ramsey and his younger children set sail for the lighthouse at last, she had her vision. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink
in it. Yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramses, the childrens, and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket, a rook, a red hot poker, the purples and grey greens of flowers. Some common feeling which held the whole together. At the same moment, James reached the lighthouse and realised that nothing is simply one thing.
The lighthouse, for instance, was stark and white, but it was also a silvery, misty looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. Every page of this delightful book has its little nugget of pure gold. Mrs. Wolfe looks deeper into things than most people, and what she sees she offers with incomparable grace. Her opinions she shares with instead of thrusting upon her readers, and what a relief that is!
End of part 18
