Chapter 5
Part 5 of Contemporary Reviews of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. SENSITIVES by A.M. The Manchester Guardian, 20th May 1927. One hopes not to fumble unforgivably in dealing with a book so fine in workmanship as Mrs.
Woolf's. So delicate in such intentions as we have divined. The background is sky, with the natives negligible, the canvas being peopled by the Ramsey family and their visitors, a sophisticated and cultivated set. But the subtle lonely land and seascape counts, for it isolates them, giving them more significance perhaps than might be their due were they merely characters in a story.
They have another use. The book is a study of sensitives by sensitivists. Minds are opened, especially Mrs. Ramsey's and the plain spinster Lily Briscoe's, but as to watch the hints, impressions, reflections, flashes from other minds and beings, now dancing up and down like a swarm of gnats, again for a moment, fixed and coloured spectrum wise before the final rapid blend of sympathetic comprehension.
Thus Mr. Ramsey, the vain egotist, albeit pathetic and of a fiery unworldliness, we know chiefly through the brilliant intuitions of his beautiful, clear-souled and indulgent wife, a non-intellectual, and her we are vividly aware of mainly through the partial intuitions of devoted friends who helplessly see her victim yet content. But Lily, unlucky in life as an artist, is the most gifted with this uncanny power.
She has the compensation if it be one that her mind is all alive with human experiences, enlightenments and humours, that she owns her world if she cannot bend it to her will or fantasy. As we look at the party grouped friendly-wise in their summer quarters, though humour is playing about them lightly all the time, we receive an impression of the intense loneliness of each. There may be more than one symbolic meaning attached to the lighthouse of the title
and of the opening and closing incidents. Is it the isolated watching mind? Is it the thing remote, so passionately desired, which turns to nothingness when we are forced to pursue it by the arrogant will of another? A deep and reticent homage to beauty speaks under the recorded irritations and frustrations of the passing day, while an austere resignation follows hard on natural yearnings after the permanent and the perfect, for our penitence deserves a glimpse only and our toil
respite only. End of part five you
