Chapter 6
Part 6 of Contemporary Reviews of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From review by Edwin Muir in The Nation and Atheneum, July 2, 1927. To the Lighthouse is a novel difficult to judge. Like the last volume on this list,
It stands at the summit of the development of a remarkable writer. Its aim is high and serious, its technique brilliant. There are more beautiful pages in it than Mrs. Woolf has written before. A unique intuition and intelligence are at work in it almost continuously and at high pressure. The difficulties which the author surmounts in it are such as few contemporary novelists would even attempt.
Its positive merits are thus very high. Yet as a whole, though showing an advance on many sides, it produces a less congruous and powerful effect than Mrs. Dalloway. The novel consists of three parts. In the first we have a picture of Mrs. Ramsey's summer household in the Hebrides before the war.
In the second, an imaginative evocation of time passing away over the house, deserted now for several years. In the last, Mr. Ramsey's return as a widower with two of his family and two old friends, the remnant of the large circle which has been reduced in the meantime by death and other causes. In the first book, James, a young boy, had been promised that he would be taken to the lighthouse, but it rains and he cannot go.
In the last book, he is a youth now. He goes with his father and his sister and everything is different. The symbolism is plain enough, but in the novel, so entangled is it with other matters, interesting enough in themselves that it becomes obscured. Actually, it is obscured most by the device which should make it most clear,
the intermediary book called Time Passes, which to add to the difficulty is the best of the lot and could only have been written by a writer of profound imagination. For this section, composed in a different key, concerned with entities more universal than the human, entities which do not need human life, but affecting everything, affect human life too, inexorably and yet as if heedlessly, is not a real transition from the first section to the last,
both conceived in human terms, but something outside them. The time which passes in this interval passes not for the characters in the story, but for everything. It is a natural, an astronomical, a cosmical transition, and not a human one except incidentally, and the result is that when Mrs. Wolf returns to the human plane, the sequence seems doubly abrupt. We are not only transported from James's childhood to his youth, we are switched from one dimension of time to another.
That this was not the right means to mark the flight of time in this place is shown, I think, by the effect of the third section, for that effect is not intensified. It is, if anything, lessened by what has gone immediately before. Yet one cannot regret that Mrs. Wolf wrote the second section in this book. For imagination and beauty of writing, it is probably not surpassed in contemporary prose. But how this kind of imagination can be applied, as one feels sure it can, to the business of the novelist,
the shadowing fourth of human life is still a problem to be solved. End of part six.
