Chapter 3
Part 3 of Contemporary Reviews of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From Virginia Woolf and Others by Rachel A. Taylor From The Spectator, May 14th, 1927 The dark light, the bright shadow, was what Leonardo sought, he said, through all the scientists and all the arts.
The bright shadow, the dark light, seemed to shift and flicker and fuse in strange pavan to make the fascinating chiaroscuro of the novels of Mrs. Woolf. The woven paces of dark and bright on the lovely superfeces of any book of hers offer an aesthetic pleasure so deep that at moments you almost forget the dreaming figures beneath, whose vibrating hearts actually create that enigmatic pattern. Enigmatic, darkly bright, flowing into the secret recesses of the consciousness, floating out its rose-pale shells, its wavering shapes, its blood-red coral,
moulding people that combine a modern irony with a mystic reverie, the genius of Virginia Woolf is at once more difficult and more original than that of any other woman novelist of today. Mrs. Dalloway is a thing perfect in its kind, a gleaming, super-subtle piece of fine filaments of impression and emotion gathered into the pattern of the rose, a complete crystal eddy of the river of life. To the lighthouse is not so flawless in its aesthetic effect.
The unities agree with this novelist's power and here the unity of time is rather violently broken while the parts of the book seem disproportionate, but it is even more wistfully human perhaps. Nothing happens and everything happens. To the lighthouse the child James desires to go and, sitting by his mother's feet, is tauntingly denied by his despotic, myriad-mooded father. To the lighthouse, long years after he does go, dragged there, reluctant by that despotic, myriad-minded father, and is suddenly mysteriously reconciled with him in his heart.
Between these incidents people are born and marry and die, but all these matters are incidental to the souls that cross and intercross in the web of an everlasting reverie. In this book there are secret flames in flowers and inanimate things, waking in response to the fixed gaze of the unconscious symbolists who are weaving them into the tapestry of their dreams. Subtle sensations are caught here that are elusive as a fragrance or a flavour. Psychical processes are laid bare by burning, piercing images. Cadences are heard that never violate the rhythm of prose, yet chime aerial and strange as the rhythm of verse.
In the ghostly second part, where the perishing life of the house sighs away, the lamenting style with its eluted in refrains and its bitter tragic parentheses, in some passages chants heavily and dreamily like the prose litanies of Malamé, Frieson d'Hiver for example. Indeed, more beauty and penetrative characterisation than can here be described resides within this book. The Ramses, husband and wife, move at the centre of attention, along with red torch plants in the Twilight Garden. The husband is a remarkably observed figure, but I prefer to linger a moment on his wife, who has the deathless grace, regality and sweetness of legendary women.
She is whimsical, extravagant in speech, absurd a little, versed in all tender ways of loving. She bewitches you. Even the crude Tansley thinks of cyclamen and violence when he sees her, as if, stepping through fields of flowers, taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen. Yet she is lost in an endless sad reverie. She feels remote and lonely like the white beam of the lighthouse laid on the darkness. She is sorrowful for something lost, out of time, something that, found, would illuminate eternity. So her spirit goes veiled and dreamy, like the carved Greek women mourning on the side of a Sedonian sarcophagus.
Under the modern talk, all the folk around her go sunken also in their peculiar meditation. But why, when this account of the interaction of naked thinking hearts needs merely a setting of a house and a terrace, some rocks and a bay and a lighthouse, must the house be placed in the Hebrides? Mrs. Wolfe creates her own atmosphere wherever she takes her people, but to anybody who has been subdued by the magic of the Hebridean atmosphere, there is a disturbance of impression, a collision of spiritual values. Her pattern should never be superimposed.
