Chapter 25
XXVII. We hope that all the readers who were troubled and confused by Jacob's room, saddened and even a little confused by Mrs. Dalloway, will read to the lighthouse. For here they will be neither troubled nor confused, and if they are saddened, their sadness will be filled with beauty.
We hope too that all who care for English literature, but have somehow missed her other works will read this, Mrs. Wolfe's masterpiece, and appreciate one of the most subtle and sensitive minds now expressing itself in the novel. Mrs. Wolfe's prose is written in the mood of poetry. She is intensely interested in the outsides of things, but only as they express the inner
beauty, the hidden reality of the mystery we call life. She has never tried to reach her goal by easy or pedestrian methods. Her steed has always been pegasus, winged and fiery, springing toward cloud-capped towers. She has tried to rule him in her own way and has not always succeeded. Sometimes he has escaped with her where we could not follow.
Sometimes she has missed her goal, but here she has mastered him. Her book is a poem in prose. Her difficult method, which shows us life through the minds of her characters, those minds in which emotion and thought are forever blending, changing with every impression of the senses and changing those impressions to feelings and ideas, no longer seems to
distort life, but to show it more intensely and clearly like a landscape seen through the diminishing glass of a painter. To the Lighthouse is a study in the reactions of one temperament on another, the ebb and flow of feelings, especially of the feelings of her family and friends to Mrs. Ramsey, the beautiful, the masterful, the loving.
Mrs. Ramsey, who is like a natural force, almost a personification of the beauty, the strange persuasion, the broken comforts of what we call nature. It is a study in the difficulties of love, a friendship. Beauty informs this book as the sunlight informs a summer's day, as a reflection fills the river with the green hillside.
End of part 25
