Chapter 4
Part 4 of Contemporary Reviews of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Novel as Work of Art Review by Conrad Aiken in The Dial Chicago, July 1927 Among contemporary writers of fiction, Mrs. Woolf is a curious and anomalous figure. In some respect she is as modern, as radical,
as Mr. Joyce or Miss Richardson or Monsieur Jules Romain. She is a highly self-conscious examiner of consciousness, a bold and original experimenter with the technique of novel writing, but she is also, and just as strikingly in other respects, old-fashioned. This anomaly does not defy analysis. The aroma of old-fashionedness that rises from these highly original and modern novels, from the pages of Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and now again from those of To the
Lighthouse, is a quality of attitude, a quality, to use a word which is itself nowadays old-fashioned, but nonetheless fragrant, of spirit. For in this regard Mrs. Woolf is no more modern than Jane Austen. She breathes the same air of gentility, of sequestration, of tradition, of life and people and things all brought by the slow polish of centuries of tradition and use, to a pervasive refinement in which discrimination on every conceivable plane has become as instinctive and
easy as the beat of a wing. Her people are gentle people, her houses are the houses of gentle folk, and the consciousness that informs both is a consciousness of well-being and culture, of the richness and luster and dignity of tradition, a disciplined consciousness in which emotions and feelings find their appropriate attitudes as easily and naturally as habitually one is tempted to say as a skilled writer finds words. It is this tightly circumscribed choice
of scene, to use scene in a social sense, that gives to Mrs. Woolf's novels, despite her modernity of technique and insight, their odd and delicious air of parochialism as of some small village world as bright and vivid and perfect in its tininess as a miniature, a small complete world which time has somehow missed. Going into these houses one would almost expect to find Auntie Macassar's on the chairbacks and Daguerreotype albums on the tables, but these people, these Clarissa Dalloways
and Mrs. Ramesses and Lily Briscoes are all vibrantly and saturatedly conscious of background and they all have the curious innocence that accompanies that sort of awareness. They are the creatures of seclusion, the creatures of shelter, they are exquisite beings, so perfectly and elaborately adapted to their environment that they have taken on something of the roundness and perfection of works of art. Their life, in a sense, is a seapool life,
unruffled and secret, almost, if we can share the cool illusion of the seapool's occupants, inviolable. They hear rumours of the sea itself, that vast and terrifying force that lies somewhere beyond them or around them, but they cherish a sublime faith that it will not disturb them, and if it does at last break in upon them with cataclysmic force, a chaos of disorder and undisciplined violence, they can find no language for the disaster. They are simply bewildered.
But if, choosing such people and such a mise-en-scène for her material, Mrs. Wolfe inevitably makes her readers think of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, she compels us, just as sharply by her method of evoking them, to think of Pilgrimage and Ulysses and the Death of a Nobody. Mrs. Wolfe is an excellent critic, an extremely conscious and brilliant craftsman in prose. She is intensely interested in the technique of fiction, and one
has at times wondered, so vividly from her prose has arisen a kind of self-consciousness of adroitness, whether she might not lose her way and give us a mere series of virtuosities or toward a force. It is easy to understand why Catherine Mansfield distrusted Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. She felt a kind of sterility in this dexterous holding of the raw stuff of life at arm's length, this playing with it as if it were a toy. Why not be more immediate, why not surrender
to it, and one did indeed feel a rather baffling aloofness in this attitude. It was as if Mrs. Wolfe were a little afraid to come to grips with anything so coarse, preferred to see it through a safe thickness of plate glass. It was as if she could not be quite at ease with life until she had stilled it, reduced it to the mobile immobility of art, reduced it even to such comfortable proportions and orderliness as would not disturb the drawing room.
In Jacob's Room, however, and Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Wolfe began to make it clear that this tendency to sterile dexterity, though pronounced, might not be fatal, and now in her new novel To the Lighthouse, she relieves one's doubts on this score almost entirely. For if one still feels during the first part of this novel, almost depressingly and intermittently thereafter, Mrs. Wolfe's irritating air as of carrying an enormous technical burden, her air
of saying, See how easily I do this, or This is incomparably complex and difficult, but I have the brains for it. Nevertheless, one's irritation is soon lost in the growing sense that Mrs. Wolfe has at last found a complexity and force of theme which is commensurate with the elaborateness and self-consciousness of her technical pattern. By degrees one forgets the manner in the matter. One resists the manner, petulantly objects to it in vain. The moment comes when at last one
ceases to be aware of something persistently artificial in this highly feminine style, and finds oneself simply immersed in the vividness and actuality of this world of Mrs. Wolfe's, believing in it in fact with the utmost intensity, and feeling it with the completeness of surrender which one feels the most moving of poetry. It is not easy to say whether this abdication of distance on the reader's part indicates that Mrs. Wolfe has now achieved a depth of poetic
understanding, a vitality which was somehow just lacking in the earlier novels, or whether it merely indicates a final triumph of technique. Can one profitably try to make a distinction between work that is manufactured bitterly and strenuously by sheer will to imagination, and work that is born of imagination all complete, assuming that the former is, in the upshot, just as convincing as the latter? Certainly one feels everywhere in Mrs. Wolfe's work this will to imagine,
this canvassing of possibilities by a restless and searching and brilliant mind. One feels this mind at work, matching and selecting, rejecting this colour and accepting that, saying, it is this that the heroine would say, it is this that she would think, and nevertheless Mrs. Wolfe's step is so sure, her choice is so nearly invariably right, and her imagination, even if deliberately willed, is so imaginative that in the end she makes a beautiful success of it. She makes her Mrs. Ramsey
by giving us her stream of consciousness amazingly alive, and she supplements this just sufficiently from outside as it were, by giving us also intermittently the streams of consciousness of her husband, of her friend Lily Briscoe, of her children, so that we are documented as to Mrs. Ramsey from every quarter, and arrive at a solid vision of her by a process of triangulation. The richness and copiousness and ease with which this is done are a delight.
These people are astoundingly real, they belong to a special class, as Mrs. Wolfe's characters nearly always do, and exhale a Jane Austenish aroma of smallness and lostness and incompleteness. But they are magnificently real. We live in that delicious house with them, we feel the minute textures of their lives with their own vivid senses, we imagine with their extraordinary imaginations, are self-conscious with their self-consciousness,
and ultimately we know them as well, as terribly as we know ourselves. Thus, curiously, Mrs. Wolfe has rounded the circle, apparently at the outset of her work, avoiding any attempt to present life immediately, as Chekhov and Catherine Mansfield preferred to do, and choosing instead a medium more sophisticated and conscious, as if she never for a moment wished us to forget the frame of the picture, and the fact that the picture was a picture.
She finally brought this method to such perfection, or so perfectly allowed it to flower of itself, that the artificial has become natural, the immediate has become immediate, the technical brilliance glows, melts, falls away, and there remains a poetic apprehension of life, of extraordinary loveliness. Nothing happens in this house full of odd nice people, and yet all of life happens. The tragic futility, the absurdity, the pathetic beauty of life,
we experience all of this in our sharing of seven hours of Mrs. Rams's wasted or not wasted existence. We have seen through her the world. End of part four.
