Chapter 21
Part 21 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From Novels and Stories by M. Robinson The New Adelphi, September 1927. What makes a novelist? We shall never learn to respect our real calling and destiny, said Scott, until we have taught
ourselves to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart. If that is true of life, it is equally true of novel writing, and yet that knowledge of the human heart is only half the novelist's equipment. Without it he will never be a serious writer, but with it alone he will be nothing but a serious writer. He must have the power so to absorb that knowledge into his very being, that when it issues forth again, it does so in independent, original forms. And that power is a heavenly gift, for lack of which, since no pains will enable a writer to acquire it.
Mrs. Woolf's latest novel, like all her others, remains the limpid reflection of her own exquisite and receptive mind, but not a piece of creative writing. She is a master analyst and tries to create by taking the elements which her analysis has separated out and combining them to build something new. But you can never in that way make the kind of homogeneous whole which alone is creatively new. That must be done by the rapid sureness of instinct, not the hesitant uncertainty of conscious thought. Contrast her method with that of Miss Mary Arden, who instinctively withdraws herself from the polished surface at which impressions are received, in order to write out of those subtler deaths in which they are assimilated and fused together.
Her materials are in consequence exactly blended into a self-existent whole, while Mrs. Woolf's pudding is sent to the table half-cooked and indigestible. But let me make my point clear by examining Mrs. Woolf's method in a particular direction, choosing one in which, owing to an organic defect, her initial impressions are imperfect. It happens that she is, as far as I can see, completely tone-deaf to colour, but since colour and sound are not things in themselves, but merely mediums by means of which the same thing may be expressed in different dimensions, it follows that anyone who is deaf to sound in colour or blind to colour in sound must express that thing in one dimension only, as a plain surface and not in the round. And this incomplete colour sense of Mrs. Woolf makes the faulty cohesions of her method glaringly conspicuous.
In the middle, a yellow and purple dish of fruit. Rose's arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus in some picture, among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. Contrast that with the effortless accuracy of a master of colour, such as Mr. D. H. Lawrence, for whom it is his natural element in which he moves free and sure. It is flat, opaque, inert, no depth, no changing lights, no warmth, no vibration.
You feel that for her colour is simply paint without life or rhythm, and presently Lily is caught thinking to herself, beneath the colour there was the shape. It recurs, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing, but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. You cannot paint a picture or write a novel with form and colour separated in this violent way. They are interpenetrative, and it is noteworthy that Mrs. Wolfe is at her best in such descriptions as that of the empty house, all twilight shadows and whispers, where there is no occasion for distinct form or decided colour, where since the whole is quite rightly one continuous slight tremolo,
inaccuracy of pitch is not noticeable, as it is when a clear note, long and full, must be struck, and any departure from the exact middle of the note is discordantly apparent. And so with her human characters she can portray their half-lights too, but definite individuality, whole, not half-thoughts, completeness, these are beyond her, and so her characters are all indeterminate, not alike, and yet indistinguishable, merging into each other in a fluid and stable way so that you are never sure when one ends and another begins.
