Chapter 29
Part 29 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. From New Fiction by T. Earl Welby. From the Saturday Review. 7th May 1927. Mrs. Woolf is an enormously clever writer who can yet take a schoolgirlish pleasure
in her own cleverness. The type, though necessarily rare, is one that I, in common with every other reviewer, have encountered before. Where Mrs. Woolf is unique, in at any rate my experience, is that her indulgence towards her own cleverness is half-humorous, which, let us hope, means that some day she will
lay aside her cleverness with an ironical wistfulness, and proceed to write the masterly book of which she is clearly capable. Meanwhile, with certain reservations, we may well be thankful for To the Lighthouse. It is not exactly a success, but the world is covered today with highly successful novels in which obvious and not particularly worthwhile things are done by competent, complacent writers.
Mrs. Woolf, aiming at the almost impossible, achieves it only intermittently, but it is difficult to think of anyone else writing today who could have come near to it. What Mrs. Woolf is about is not the production of the plain tale usually of love. She is anxious to extort from the material common to her and other novelists that which shall be expressive of her own peculiar sense of what is significant in life, that and nothing else.
Now the very greatest novelists have not fussed themselves about any such enterprise. Balzac, using every sort of material dealing with life comprehensively, reveals to us his sense of what ultimately matters, not by any deliberate exclusion, but inevitably, unconsciously, by the way in which emphasis is distributed. Mrs. Woolf's method is nothing if not deliberate.
She will select incidents which are trivial in order that the emphasis shall be on the inner lives of the characters, not on what is outwardly happening to them. She will devote a prodigious number of pages to the happenings of a single, outwardly uneventful day or hour of it. She will relate outer to inner events with an ingenuity that is tireless and may become
tiring. She has not confidence enough in herself to give us the whole story or even to have what is ordinarily understood by a story in the belief that its intimate significance will emerge under a natural treatment of it. All the same, she once more proves herself to be a writer with astonishing intuition
and a mistress of a style that can make the obscurest processes of thought and emotion luminous. There is in her new novel a long description of a family and its friends at dinner, which is a triumph. Nothing seemed to have merged.
They all sat separate, and the whole of the efforts of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it, nobody would do it, and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating as the watch begins ticking.
But it is useless to begin quoting a passage far too long for complete reproduction and needing to be reproduced in full for its appreciation. There are a dozen other passages in which the secret reactions of men and women, especially women, to the apparently trifling events of life, are rendered with a convincing and elaborate subtlety.
To have written them is to have surpassed, in this one respect, almost every contemporary novelist. It is not necessarily to have written a satisfying novel. The World Inhabited by Mrs. Wolfe's People Ramsey, the thinker who has failed after his one important contribution to the thought
of his day. Mrs. Ramsey, the children, the woman artist and the awkward young intellectual staying with them, is a world in which rather too much importance attaches to going out and coming in, sitting down and standing. It is a world without the relief of insignificant things.
Had there at that wonderfully described dinner been two sorts of soup, one feels the question, thick or clear, would have been asked with anxiety, and on the replies would have depended the future spiritual relations of several of the characters. Certainly, the question whether the family should visit the lighthouse and the father's prediction of bad weather suffice to open an immensely complicated theme, and it is
not till page 318 that Mr. Ramsey reaches the lighthouse. The symbolical value of the lighthouse remains obscure than it should be, and indeed I think the book unhappily named for it ought to have been entitled Mrs. Ramsey. The presentation of that woman as she lived and of her influence after death is consummate. On the other hand, the parenthetical method of disposing of members of the family in the
second part of the book is merely silly. Between such extremes does Mrs. Wolfe oscillate? End of part 29
