Chapter 19
Part 19 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Done in the Round by Mary Ross. From The Nation, 20th of July, 1927. Some writers can etch a character in a few sharp lines against white space.
Others unroll a whole life in flat bright patterns like a tapestry. Virginia Woolf has a unique manner of washing away the unessential as the sea sculptures a bit of broken glass, till the spirit emerges as simple, translucent, yet individual in the dignity of the loneliness which encompasses all consciousness. Her people are done in the round. They emerge until the reader becomes intensely aware of the essence which lies behind the apparent complexities and contradictions of civilized human beings.
And they would fade away like the lost Eurydice before any attempt to ticket or classify them or brand them with a label. To the Lighthouse is the quiet story of an English family who are spending the summer in the Hebrides. There is Mrs. Ramsey, about whom the story pivots, as did their life. Mr. Ramsey, who wrote one good book when he was young, and ever after was corroded by anxiety, lest he should do no more to carve his name into eternity. Their eight children and their guests.
Tansley, the conscientious atheist. Augustus Carmichael, poet and student of the Orient. Lily Briscoe, who tries to paint. William Banks, a meticulous widower, young Minter Doyle with a hole in the heel of her stocking, and Paul Rayleigh who is to marry her before the book is over. If the day is fine, they are to go to the Lighthouse in the morning.
The first half of the story is the reverie of Mrs. Ramsey as she sits in the late afternoon with James, the youngest, beside her, soothing his anxiety about the weather as she soothes the petulance of her husband. One by one, the others impinge upon her consciousness and find rest there without disturbing her own serene depths. It seems impossible that this family, these people, could live except through her. Then an interval, time passes, suggests the years that are rolling on as the old house stands untenanted, saved by the little winds of summer and the great winter gusts. Here are 25 pages of as clear and beautiful high prose as are likely to distinguish many a publishing season.
Bracketed sentences tell of the events which mark time with the family. One night, Mrs. Ramsey died quite suddenly. Prue, eldest and loveliest of the children, is dead with her baby, and Andrew is killed in battle. And so it was years later, and with an eternity of difference, that the trip to the Lighthouse finally happened. Mr. Ramsey came back with Nancy and Cam and James, who had been the little boy who wanted it so badly, and commonplace faithful Lily Briscoe was there again, and old Augustus Carmichael.
Much of this second part of the book is the reverie of Lily, looking backward and still trying futilely to grasp the present. They all have gone on. They have gone their separate and self-charted ways, as Mrs. Ramsey went hers, lacking her consciousness, her integration, yet impelled by the common need to run their course. Mrs. Dalloway, the preceding novel by Virginia Woolf, is a similar study of one woman, done with unity of time and place and person. The somewhat freer method of this latest book adds richness without dimming the peculiar quality of luminous insight which characterises all Mrs. Woolf's novels.
She has the rare ability to distill an inner life in patience and repose, unclouded by prejudice, to write in exquisite prose cadences the poetry of the mind. End of part 19.
