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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Virginia Woolf's 'The Common Reader' published in 1935 is a collection of essays that delves deep into the world of literature and the role of the reader. Woolf's distinctive literary style, characterized by her lyrical prose and introspective observations, provides readers with a unique perspective on various literary works and their impact on the common reader. Through her insightful analysis and engaging narratives, Woolf explores the relationship between writers and their audience, inviting readers to rethink their approach to reading and understanding literature. This book is a must-read for those interested in the nuances of literature and the reader-writer dynamic. Virginia Woolf, a prominent figure in the modernist movement, was known for her experimental writing style and feminist viewpoints. 'The Common Reader' showcases Woolf's intellectual prowess and keen insight into the world of literature, cementing her reputation as one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. Her personal experiences and literary background undoubtedly influenced the creation of this thought-provoking collection of essays. Overall, Virginia Woolf's 'The Common Reader' is a captivating and enlightening read that appeals to both literary enthusiasts and scholars alike. Through Woolf's literary expertise and passionate exploration of the reader's role in literature, this book offers a compelling journey into the world of reading and interpretation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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THE COMMON READER
(1935)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection gathers Virginia Woolf’s sequence of literary essays published together as The Common Reader. Under that hospitable title, Woolf writes not as a specialist policing a canon but as a companionable intellect roaming among books and lives. The purpose here is to bring into one volume her portraits, appreciations, and meditations that chart the pleasures and responsibilities of reading. Rather than offering complete novels or plays, the collection presents critical and biographical prose pieces whose unity lies in Woolf’s curiosity and exactness. Across them, she tests how a mind meets a text, and how that meeting discloses a culture.
At its core the volume is a tour of English literature by way of essays on writers and works: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Swift’s Journal to Stella, Lord Chesterfield’s letters, the diaries of James Woodforde and John Skinner, De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, and the vibrant world around Dr. Burney. It includes portraits of Cowper and Lady Austen, Beau Brummell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dorothy Wordsworth; studies of Hazlitt, George Gissing, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy; considerations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and of Christina Rossetti; and concludes with a reflection on the art of reading itself.
The genres represented are deliberately various. Woolf reads novels and verse-novels, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, biographies, and social sketches, insisting that literary value is not the property of any single form. She treats epistolary intimacy as a kind of art in Dorothy Osborne and Lord Chesterfield, regards parish diaries as literature in the Two Parsons, and attends to the crafted self of autobiography in De Quincey. In Dr. Burney’s Evening Party and Jack Mytton she considers occasions and lives that radiate beyond the printed page. The essays themselves are hybrids: critical studies, character sketches, and narrative scenes of reading.
The unifying theme is the life within literature and the life around it. Woolf listens for tone and temperament, for the rhythms by which a writer reveals a self. She is drawn to the ordinary textures preserved in letters and journals, where observation moves without ornament yet accumulates depth. She compares manners and minds across centuries, not to rank but to understand. Biography is never an anecdotal garnish; it is a means of tracing how experience finds a form. The common reader, in her account, is free to admire, question, and connect, keeping fidelity both to feeling and to fact.
Historically the range stretches from the Elizabethans to the Victorians and beyond. The Strange Elizabethans opens vistas onto an age of exuberant language and daring forms. Robinson Crusoe allows her to consider the early novel as a story of survival and resourcefulness. Swift’s Journal to Stella brings epistolary candour into political weather, while A Sentimental Journey explores travel as a theater of sensibility. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son offers conduct distilled into style. With Two Parsons, the diary becomes a civic record and a private solace, illuminating how small lives assemble the temperament of an era.
Other essays map the social scenes through which literature circulates. Dr. Burney’s Evening Party reconstructs a Georgian gathering to show how conversation, music, and observation coalesce into a culture of taste. Jack Mytton sketches a life lived in pursuit of sport and display, a reminder that character, even when extravagant, is a text to be read. De Quincey’s Autobiography is treated as an experiment in memory and self-narration. Beau Brummell’s poise becomes a study in style as social power. These pieces demonstrate Woolf’s belief that manners, environments, and habits help determine what prose can do.
A distinctive emphasis falls on women’s writing and women’s lives. Geraldine and Jane traces a friendship through correspondence, revealing intellect conducted by post. Mary Wollstonecraft appears as a radical thinker whose convictions sharpen prose. Dorothy Wordsworth’s notebooks become a model of attention that sustains poetry without claiming it. I Am Christina Rossetti weighs a vocation marked by devotional intensity and reticence. The Niece of an Earl considers class as a shaping pressure on a woman’s choices. Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse about a woman poet, allows Woolf to examine ambition, form, and the resources of a female imagination.
When Woolf turns to critics and novelists, she balances sympathy with judgment. Hazlitt is approached as a master of the familiar essay and a combative intelligence; Gissing as a novelist probing the pressures of modern urban life; Meredith as an inventor of bristling style and comic thought; Hardy as a maker of fictions where place and moral imagination are inextricable. She attends to diction, design, and temperament, often recreating the conditions in which a book might be best met. The aim is not to decree verdicts but to record the impressions a scrupulous common reader inevitably forms.
Stylistically, these essays are supple, lucid, and vividly figurative. Woolf moves by association rather than system, letting images and analogies carry argument. She frames criticism as an encounter—often beginning with a scene, a mood, or an object from which reflection grows. The prose is poised yet exploratory, hospitable to digression that reveals pattern. She resists jargon, preferring cadence and exact observation. Throughout, there is a characteristic doubleness: intimacy without credulity, irony without scorn. The result is criticism that is itself a literary experience, quick with character, alive to sound, and attentive to the felt shape of thought.
The lasting significance of this collection lies in the breadth it gives to the word literature and in the freedom it accords to readers. By aligning diaries and letters with canonical novels, Woolf enlarges what counts as worthy of careful attention. By modelling an alert, independent sensibility, she offers a method that has influenced later critics and essayists. The Common Reader does not advance a single thesis; it makes a case for reading as an art of curiosity, tact, and re-reading. In its pages a tradition becomes conversational rather than monumental, inviting participation rather than mere assent.
The internal architecture also matters. Paired essays such as Two Parsons create a diptych that refines perception by contrast. Four Figures arranges portraits so that each clarifies the others, a miniature gallery in prose. Dr. Burney’s Evening Party, divided in two, sustains a scene long enough for its nuances to surface. The volume’s order produces constellations rather than a chronology, encouraging the reader to notice recurring problems—voice, sincerity, authority, style—under different historical lights. That design enacts a principle central to the whole: criticism can be a form of composition, making patterns with lives and books.
Gathered here, these essays present Virginia Woolf’s vision of the reader’s province and pleasure across a wide, humane territory. The collection is not an encyclopedia of authors, nor a syllabus, but a sustained demonstration of how an alert mind moves through literature of many kinds. Novels, short narratives, poems, letters, diaries, and memoirs supply the occasions; the argument is that the common reader’s freedom is a discipline. To read these pieces together is to meet a writer who makes attention an ethics and style a form of knowledge, and who invites us to continue the conversation.
Author Biography
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose innovations helped define literary modernism. Working in early twentieth-century London, she pursued new forms for representing consciousness, time, and the textures of everyday life. A central figure among the writers and artists later called the Bloomsbury Group, she linked experiment with exacting criticism, arguing for the freedom of the “common reader” while extending the novel’s capacities. Her essays and reviews cultivated a living conversation with the past, and her fiction—by turns lyrical, searching, and architectural—reshaped expectations of narrative. Across genres, Woolf sought the widest possible liberty for art and for readers.
Educated largely at home in a book-lined Victorian household, Woolf read omnivorously from adolescence, absorbing classics and eighteenth-century prose alongside contemporary voices. She attended the Ladies’ Department at King’s College London, where formal study in history and Greek complemented independent reading. Early journalism for periodicals honed her clarity and argumentative poise. Friendship circles that became the Bloomsbury Group encouraged candor, skepticism, and experiment, reinforcing her conviction that literature is a mode of inquiry. In the essay “How Should One Read a Book?” she articulates a reader-centered method, valuing freedom, responsiveness, and re-reading—principles that guide her criticism as well as her fiction.
Her career in fiction began with realist frames that soon yielded to radical design. The Voyage Out and Night and Day test social and psychological boundaries within recognizable forms; Jacob’s Room fractures those forms, assembling a life from glimpses. Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse refine a method for tracing consciousness across a single day or through memory’s tides, revealing the patterns that bind private experience to public time. While these works won admiring readers and debate in equal measure, they confirmed Woolf’s commitment to an exploratory art that trusts sensation, image, and cadence as much as plot.
Alongside fiction, Woolf sustained a major career as an essayist. The Common Reader, particularly its second series, surveys a tradition with lively exactness. She revisits Defoe in “Robinson Crusoe” and Swift in “Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella,’” uncovers the intimate economies of “Dorothy Osborne’s ‘Letters,’” and gauges Sterne’s travel in “The ‘Sentimental Journey.’” Social manners and moral tone are tested in “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” and “Two Parsons (James Woodforde; the Rev. John Skinner).” “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party” stages the eighteenth century’s mixed company, while portraits such as “Jack Mytton” and “De Quincey’s Autobiography” calibrate eccentricity and self-myth.
In “Four Figures” she pairs tact with judgment: Cowper and Lady Austen’s fragile companionship, Beau Brummell’s style as ethic, Mary Wollstonecraft’s vindications, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s notebooks. Essays like “William Hazlitt,” “George Gissing,” and “The Novels of George Meredith” reassess reputation and form, while “The Novels of Thomas Hardy” weighs an imaginative landscape’s fatalism against sheer vitality. Her commitment to women’s writing runs through “I Am Christina Rossetti,” “Geraldine and Jane,” “Aurora Leigh,” and “The Niece of an Earl,” where she reconstructs lives from letters, rumor, and texts. The method is dialogic: to make the dead audible without embalming them.
These critical labors inform her feminist arguments. A Room of One’s Own frames material conditions—income, space, inheritance—as preconditions for artistic freedom; Three Guineas extends that analysis to education and public life. Fiction answered theory: Orlando transforms biography into a playful history of gender and English prose; The Waves tests the chorus as novel. With Leonard Woolf she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which published her work and that of contemporaries, enabling editorial independence and typographic experiment. The credo of “How Should One Read a Book?”—alert, skeptical, ardent—connects her workshop to her classroom, and her critics’ desk to her novels.
In late work she continued to braid history with intimate perception. Between the Acts, set around a village pageant, compresses England’s cultural memory on the eve of war. The diaries and essays of the period show attention sharpened by crisis yet intent on nuance. She died in 1941 during the Second World War. Her legacy endures in the modern novel’s freedoms, in feminist criticism’s questions about authority and access, and in the durable pleasures of the essay. The Common Reader remains a companionable guide across centuries, while her fiction invites new readers to test, again, how a book might be read.
Historical Context
Published in the mid-1930s, Virginia Woolf’s second series of essays gathered as The Common Reader surveys English literature from the Elizabethans to the late Victorians through the sensibility of a modernist writer between two world wars. Educated outside universities and active with the Hogarth Press, Woolf combined archival curiosity with a democratizing ideal of criticism. She wrote amid economic depression, the rise of fascism, and renewed debates about education and the canon. Her method—reading letters, diaries, memoirs, and novels together—reflects a twentieth‑century turn toward social history, life‑writing, and the history of reading, as newly edited eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century papers poured from publishers’ lists.
The Strange Elizabethans evokes the sixteenth‑century world that formed English vernacular prose and drama: the Elizabethan religious settlement after decades of conflict; the diffusion of print; humanist pedagogy; and expanding horizons through seafaring and trade. Woolf attends to the period’s coexistence of learned rhetoric and popular vitality, reminding readers that early modern habits—humoral medicine, astrology, honor culture—sit beside classical imitation and civic ambition. The burgeoning theatre, patronage networks, and the grammar‑school education of writers created the conditions for a heterogeneous literature whose vigor and strangeness modern readers recognize yet cannot fully domesticate.
“Robinson Crusoe” anchors the early eighteenth‑century rise of the English novel in a world of commerce, dissenting piety, and empire. Published in 1719 by Daniel Defoe, a journalist and projector, the book resonates with post‑Glorious Revolution confidence, expanding maritime trade, and Protestant individualism. Britain’s growing involvement in Atlantic networks—including slavery—forms the unspoken economic backdrop for castaway self‑sufficiency. The period’s credit crises and speculative ventures, culminating soon after in the South Sea Bubble (1720), sharpen the narrative’s fascination with risk, accounting, and possession. Woolf reads the text against a culture that prized industriousness and self‑help while projecting authority overseas.
“Dorothy Osborne’s ‘Letters’” draws on correspondence written during the English Interregnum (1652–1654), when the monarchy had fallen and allegiances fractured families. A Royalist gentlewoman under strain, Osborne writes to William Temple across political and social obstacles characteristic of the 1650s. The letters exemplify how civil war reconfigured domestic life, courtship, and mobility; they also show the letter as a resilient genre for women’s self‑presentation before formal avenues of authorship widened. Circulating in manuscript and preserved by descendants, such letters came to print centuries later, illustrating how modern editorial labor reshaped the seventeenth century for contemporary readers.
“Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella’” belongs to the volatile years 1710–1713, when Jonathan Swift moved among ministers of Queen Anne’s Tory government during the last phase of the War of the Spanish Succession. Party journalism, pamphleteering, and coffee‑house talk animated public life, and Swift’s familiar letters record politics as daily experience: the rise and fall of Harley and Bolingbroke, negotiations toward the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), and the rivalries of authors and patrons. Woolf treats the journal as both intimate speech and an index of metropolitan power, written in a moment when periodical print and partisan allegiance shaped literary careers.
“The ‘Sentimental Journey’” situates Laurence Sterne’s work within the later eighteenth century’s culture of sensibility and the Grand Tour. Published in 1768, the text reflects pre‑Revolutionary contact between Britain and continental Europe and the fashion for travel narratives that tested the line between observation and self‑display. Sterne converts the journey into an experiment in sympathy—part of a broader ethical program that linked feeling to virtue in novels, sermons, and painting. Woolf underscores how changing codes of politeness, gender, and performance allowed the traveler‑narrator to stage encounters as moral theater, while hinting at the limits of such cosmopolitan ease on the eve of upheaval.
“Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” emerge from the Enlightenment’s transnational culture of civility. Written mid‑century and published posthumously in 1774, the letters model worldly cultivation—languages, conversation, and manners—necessary for navigating court and diplomacy. Their appearance re‑ignited arguments about sincerity and ethics: Dr. Johnson famously repudiated Chesterfield’s patronage in 1755, signaling a shift from aristocratic tutelage to professional authorship. Woolf reads the letters as a conduct book for elites in a Britain consolidating imperial and commercial power, where French remained a lingua franca and the art of pleasing operated as social capital with ambiguous moral claims.
“Two Parsons” juxtaposes James Woodforde (1740–1803) and the Rev. John Skinner of Camerton (1772–1839), whose diaries preserve the texture of parish life from the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century. Their records register enclosure, fluctuating grain prices, tithes, poor relief, and the disruptions of war with France. Clerical sociability, modest consumption, and local disputes show how national change filtered through village economies and customs. As turnpikes improved travel and newspapers spread, the rural clergy stood at a crossroads of tradition and modernization. Woolf uses these diarists to map everyday England beyond metropolitan narratives of genius and revolution.
“Dr. Burney’s Evening Party” reconstructs the sociable world around the music historian Charles Burney and his daughter, the novelist‑diarist Frances (Fanny) Burney, during the later eighteenth century. Their circles connected musicians, actors, painters, and writers in London’s salons, coffee‑houses, and theatres, including encounters with Samuel Johnson and the Bluestockings. The Burney diaries capture the period’s transition from patronage to professional literary life and the ambivalent visibility of women in public culture. Etiquette, performance, and conversation acted as media of reputation. Woolf emphasizes how such gatherings fostered both intellectual exchange and pressures of decorum that shaped women’s authorship.
“Jack Mytton” draws on the 1830s sporting biography of the Shropshire squire John Mytton, written by “Nimrod” (C. J. Apperley). It offers a portrait of Regency and early Victorian gentry life—field sports, gambling, extravagant display—on the cusp of social reordering. Expanding credit, permissive attitudes to debt, and the institution of debtors’ prisons formed the material context for such careers. Meanwhile, enclosure, improved roads, and early railways transformed landscapes and leisure. Woolf treats the book as a document of a vanishing squirearchy, measuring its bravado against the rise of urban bourgeois values and reformist politics that culminated in the 1832 Reform Act.
“De Quincey’s Autobiography” engages with the early nineteenth century’s urban modernity and periodical press. Thomas De Quincey published Confessions of an English Opium‑Eater (1821) amid a vibrant magazine culture (London Magazine, Blackwood’s) served by improved mail‑coach networks and a growing reading public. Laudanum—widely available before the Pharmacy Act of 1868—connected private experience to imperial commerce and medical practice. De Quincey’s labyrinthine London, fascination with memory, and episodic form mirror a city shaped by industrialization and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Woolf reads his self‑fashioning alongside the commercialization of literature and the aesthetics of dream and recoil.
“Four Figures” gathers emblematic lives from the long eighteenth and Romantic eras. William Cowper’s piety and domestic verse intersect with Evangelical currents and debates about sensibility; Lady Austen’s presence highlights female influence within private circles. Beau Brummell personifies Regency dandyism, sartorial reform, and proximity to the Prince Regent, before exile under unforgiving debt laws. Mary Wollstonecraft’s career unfolds within the French Revolutionary debate and dissenting networks that championed women’s rights. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals testify to the Lake District’s collaborative Romanticism and the often invisible labor of women. Woolf uses these profiles to track shifting ideals of virtue, taste, gender, and sociability.
“William Hazlitt” returns to the turbulent politics of the 1810s and 1820s—the post‑Napoleonic reaction, Peterloo (1819), and the Six Acts—out of which Hazlitt’s combative criticism and theatre writing emerged. Periodicals such as the Examiner and the London Magazine fostered an argumentative public sphere, where style itself was a political weapon. Hazlitt’s attacks on cant and privilege reflect a generation that inherited Revolutionary hopes yet wrote under surveillance and prosecution. Woolf situates him within a metropolitan bohemia of lectures, coffee‑houses, and galleries, emphasizing how a new professional critic navigated market pressures, libel risks, and the unstable authority of public opinion.
“Geraldine and Jane” examines the correspondence between Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Welsh Carlyle, a mid‑Victorian record of female friendship across Manchester’s industrial world and Chelsea’s literary household. The letters register Chartist agitation, factory‑town rhythms, and the strictures of domestic ideology. The introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in 1840 expanded such epistolary networks, enabling intimate yet far‑reaching conversations about work, health, ambition, and marriage. Woolf’s interest lies in how private voices illuminate the moral economy of the age—the expectations placed on women’s tact and unpaid labor within circles dominated by male celebrity and intellectual authority.
“‘Aurora Leigh’” situates Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse‑novel in debates about women’s education, artistic vocation, and social reform. Woolf reads the poem against a mid‑Victorian backdrop of philanthropy, anti‑slavery legacies, and early campaigns that would lead to the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882). The work’s engagement with urban poverty, publishing markets, and international travel reflects a Britain confident in its power yet anxious about inequality. Poetic narrative becomes a vehicle for moral argument, aligning with a generation of women writers who claimed public authority through forms that intertwined domestic feeling with critiques of class and gender constraints.
“The Niece of an Earl” turns to nineteenth‑century aristocratic memoir and letter‑writing, a genre made fashionable by editors and family archives in the decades around 1900. Woolf probes how rank organizes perception: proximity to court, diplomatic households, and salons shaped what gentlewomen recorded and what they omitted. Such narratives move through the Regency and early Victorian periods—eras of reform, expanding print culture, and intense interest in personality. By placing these memoirs beside canonical texts, Woolf reveals the interplay between status, reticence, and observation, and how later publication reframed private papers as evidence for social and literary history.
“George Gissing” addresses the late Victorian literary marketplace and urban realism. Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Gissing depicted lower‑middle‑class precarity amid commercial publishing, circulating libraries, and the new profession of writing. His novels chart the costs of respectability and the constraints on women’s employment, themes sharpened by economic depressions and debates over education and marriage. Woolf considers how Gissing’s pessimism springs from the clash between aesthetic standards and the demands of editors, subscribers, and moral guardians in an age of widening literacy yet tight cultural policing—an environment in which the novel simultaneously diversified and risked formulaic compromise to survive financially, “Grub Street” renewed.,
Synopsis (Selection)
THE STRANGE ELIZABETHANS
Woolf investigates the energy, extravagance, and alien habits of Elizabethan writers to explain why they can feel both remote and startlingly alive to modern readers. She weighs their gusto for language and sensation against modern standards of self-consciousness and restraint, tracing how strangeness becomes a key to their lasting vitality.
“ROBINSON CRUSOE”
Reading Defoe’s tale, Woolf stresses the hypnotic power of accumulated fact and routine to build a world from solitude. She considers how a plain, impersonal style can generate conviction while leaving psychology and sentiment in deliberate shadow.
DOROTHY OSBORNE’S “LETTERS”
Woolf celebrates the letters as a self-portrait composed of tact, wit, and steadfast judgment. She shows how everyday detail and conversational ease create an art of intimacy that rivals more formal literature.
SWIFT’S “JOURNAL TO STELLA”
Woolf reads the private journal-letters for their oscillation between tenderness and scorn, exposing a divided temperament. The piece weighs how secrecy and playfulness shape an intimate voice that powerfully reframes Swift’s public ferocity.
THE “SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY”
Woolf highlights Sterne’s drifting, flirtatious traveler and the art of digression that privileges sensation over plot. She argues that lightness of touch can harbor a sly critique of manners, keeping feeling and irony in delicate balance.
LORD CHESTERFIELD’S LETTERS TO HIS SON
Woolf considers the letters as a manual of worldliness that turns manners into a system of power. She tracks the elegance and calculation of the style, asking what is lost when breeding becomes a mask stronger than the face.
TWO PARSONS (I James Woodforde; II The Rev. John Skinner)
Pairing two country clergymen’s journals, Woolf contrasts James Woodforde’s hearty record of meals, parish rounds, and homely pleasures with the Rev. John Skinner’s more solitary, fanciful temperament. She finds in both the quiet drama of routine and the ways personality leaks through ledger-like detail.
DR. BURNEY’S EVENING PARTY (I–II)
Reconstructing a social gathering around Dr. Burney, Woolf stages the sparkle and strain of conversation, celebrity, and female accomplishment under polite scrutiny. Across its two parts, the essay moves from bright surfaces to a subtler accounting of constraint and observation.
JACK MYTTON
Woolf sketches the legend of a reckless country squire whose bravado turns sport into self-destruction. The portrait probes the allure of swagger and the emptiness it conceals, testing the myth of carefree Englishness against its costs.
DE QUINCEY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Woolf traces a memoirist who turns memory into dream, where confession becomes performance and style blossoms into haunting cadence. She weighs the rapture of vision against evasion, asking what kind of truth such prose can tell.
FOUR FIGURES (Cowper and Lady Austen; Beau Brummell; Mary Wollstonecraft; Dorothy Wordsworth)
In four brief lives, Woolf studies creativity as it flickers between intimacy, fashion, moral passion, and attention to the ordinary. She shows Cowper’s fragile dependence on Lady Austen, Brummell’s dandyism as aesthetic, Wollstonecraft’s fearless candor, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s diarist art of seeing—together mapping the pressures that shape a life and its pages.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Woolf praises Hazlitt’s prose for its heat, honesty, and argumentative drive, driven by a fierce sense of the self at stake. She considers how his partialities become a measure of truth, making criticism a live encounter rather than a creed.
GERALDINE AND JANE
Through a cache of letters between two Victorian friends, Woolf uncovers a drama of female intimacy, intellect, and domestic endurance. The correspondence reveals how wit and candor negotiate power and fatigue within marriage and literary society.
“AURORA LEIGH”
Woolf assesses a verse-novel that weds poetic amplitude to the modern story of a woman artist finding her vocation. She measures its rhetorical daring and expansiveness against narrative unevenness, valuing its ambition to make poetry answer to contemporary life.
THE NIECE OF AN EARL
Woolf pieces together the life of an aristocratic woman whose rank both enables and confines her, attending to the odd freedoms granted by privilege. The portrait teases out eccentricity, will, and spectacle while registering how social frameworks script even the desire to escape them.
GEORGE GISSING
Woolf presents Gissing as a severe realist preoccupied with poverty, thwarted talent, and the narrow choices allotted to women. She respects his integrity and sobriety while noting how austerity can harden into limitation.
THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
Woolf examines Meredith’s brilliant, strenuous style—its epigram, high comedy, and athletic intellect—which demands an active partner in the reader. She weighs the exhilaration of ideas-in-action against a certain thinness of flesh-and-blood feeling.
“I AM CHRISTINA ROSSETTI”
Adopting an imaginative closeness, Woolf probes Rossetti’s devout restraint and the power of refusal in her lyric art. The essay balances admiration for spiritual concentration with questions about what is renounced to secure such purity.
THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY1
Woolf considers Hardy’s tragedies where character, chance, and an animate landscape converge to make destiny feel both accidental and ordained. She finds a grave music in his compassion for ordinary lives, even when structure strains under the weight of fate.
HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?1
Woolf counsels readers to approach books with freedom and responsiveness, testing them by private judgment rather than authority. She compares the different demands of poetry, fiction, and life-writing, urging a patient, alert attention that lets form reveal itself.
THE COMMON READER (1935)
THE STRANGE ELIZABETHANS
There are few greater delights than to go back three or four hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. That such fancies are only fancies, that this “becoming an Elizabethan”, this reading sixteenth-century writing as currently and certainly as we read our own is an illusion, is no doubt true. Very likely the Elizabethans would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible; our fancy picture of what it pleases us to call Elizabethan life would rouse their ribald merriment. Still, the instinct that drives us to them is so strong and the freshness and vigour that blow through their pages are so sweet that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being ridiculous.
And if we ask why we go further astray in this particular region of English literature than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Elizabethan prose, for all its beauty and bounty, was a very imperfect medium. It was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things. In an age of utilitarian prose like our own, we know exactly how people spend the hours between breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor miserable. Poetry ignores these slighter shades; the social student can pick up hardly any facts about daily life from Shakespeare’s plays; and if prose refuses to enlighten us, then one avenue of approach to the men and women of another age is blocked. Elizabethan prose, still scarcely separated off from the body of its poetry, could speak magnificently, of course, about the great themes—how life is short, and death certain; how spring is lovely, and winter horrid—perhaps, indeed, the lavish and towering periods that it raises above these simple platitudes are due to the fact that it has not cheapened itself upon trifles. But the price it pays for this soaring splendour is to be found in its awkwardness when it comes to earth—when Lady Sidney, for example, finding herself cold at nights, has to solicit the Lord Chamberlain for a better bedroom at Court. Then any housemaid of her own age could put her case more simply and with greater force. Thus, if we go to the Elizabethan prose-writers to solidify the splendid world of Elizabethan poetry as we should go now to our biographers, novelists, and journalists to solidify the world of Pope, of Tennyson, of Conrad, we are perpetually baffled and driven from our quest. What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Shakespeare? Even the familiar letters of the time give us little help. Sir Henry Wotton is pompous and ornate and keeps us stiffly at arm’s length. Their histories resound with drums and trumpets. Their broadsheets reverberate with meditations upon death and reflections upon the immortality of the soul. Our best chance of finding them off their guard and so becoming at ease with them is to seek one of those unambitious men who haunt the outskirts of famous gatherings, listening, observing, sometimes taking a note in a book. But they are difficult to find. Gabriel Harvey perhaps, the friend of Spenser and of Sidney, might have fulfilled that function. Unfortunately the values of the time persuaded him that to write about rhetoric, to write about Thomas Smith, to write about Queen Elizabeth in Latin, was better worth doing than to record the table talk of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. But he possessed to some extent the modern instinct for preserving trifles, for keeping copies of letters, and for making notes of ideas that struck him in the margins of books. If we rummage among these fragments we shall, at any rate, leave the highroad and perhaps hear some roar of laughter from a tavern door, where poets are drinking; or meet humble people going about their milking and their love-making without a thought that this is the great Elizabethan age, or that Shakespeare is at this moment strolling down the Strand and might tell one, if one plucked him by the sleeve, to whom he wrote the sonnets, and what he meant by Hamlet.
The first person whom we meet is indeed a milkmaid—Gabriel Harvey’s sister Mercy. In the winter of 1574 she was milking in the fields near Saffron Walden accompanied by an old woman, when a man approached her and offered her cakes and malmsey wine. When they had eaten and drunk in a wood and the old woman had wandered off to pick up sticks, the man proceeded to explain his business. He came from Lord Surrey, a youth of about Mercy’s own age—seventeen or eighteen that is—and a married man. He had been bowling one day and had seen the milkmaid; her hat had blown off and “she had somewhat changed her colour”. In short, Lord Surrey had fallen passionately in love with her; and sent her by the same man gloves, a silk girdle, and an enamel posy ring which he had torn from his own hat though his Aunt, Lady W–-, had given it him for a very different purpose. Mercy at first stood her ground. She was a poor milkmaid, and he was a noble gentleman. But at last she agreed to meet him at her house in the village. Thus, one very misty, foggy night just before Christmas, Lord Surrey and his servant came to Saffron Walden. They peered in at the malthouse, but saw only her mother and sisters; they peeped in at the parlour, but only her brothers were there. Mercy herself was not to be seen; and “well mired and wearied for their labour”, there was nothing for it but to ride back home again. Finally, after further parleys, Mercy agreed to meet Lord Surrey in a neighbour’s house alone at midnight. She found him in the little parlour “in his doublet and hose, his points untrust, and his shirt lying round about him”. He tried to force her on to the bed; but she cried out, and the good wife, as had been agreed between them, rapped on the door and said she was sent for. Thwarted, enraged, Lord Surrey cursed and swore, “God confound me, God confound me”, and by way of lure emptied his pockets of all the money in them—thirteen shillings in shillings and testers it came to—and made her finger it. Still, however, Mercy made off, untouched, on condition that she would come again on Christmas eve. But when Christmas eve dawned she was up betimes and had put seven miles between her and Saffron Walden by six in the morning, though it snowed and rained so that the floods were out, and P., the servant, coming later to the place of assignation, had to pick his way through the water in pattens. So Christmas passed. And a week later, in the very nick of time to save her honour, the whole story very strangely was discovered and brought to an end. On New Year’s Eve her brother Gabriel, the young fellow of Pembroke Hall, was riding back to Cambridge when he came up with a simple countryman whom he had met at his father’s house. They rode on together, and after some country gossip, the man said that he had a letter for Gabriel in his pocket. Indeed, it was addressed “To my loving brother Mr. G. H.”, but when Gabriel opened it there on the road, he found that the address was a lie. It was not from his sister Mercy, but to his sister Mercy. “Mine Own Sweet Mercy”, it began; and it was signed “Thine more than ever his own Phil”. Gabriel could hardly control himself—“could scarcely dissemble my sudden fancies and comprimitt my inward passions”—as he read. For it was not merely a love-letter; it was more; it talked about possessing Mercy according to promise. There was also a fair English noble wrapped up in the paper. So Gabriel, doing his best to control himself before the countryman, gave him back the letter and the coin and told him to deliver them both to his sister at Saffron Walden with this message: “To look ere she leap. She may pick out the English of it herself.” He rode on to Cambridge; he wrote a long letter to the young lord, informing him with ambiguous courtesy that the game was up. The sister of Gabriel Harvey was not to be the mistress of a married nobleman. Rather she was to be a maid, “diligent, and trusty and tractable”, in the house of Lady Smith at Audley End. Thus Mercy’s romance breaks off; the clouds descend again; and we no longer see the milkmaid, the old woman, the treacherous serving man who came with malmsey and cakes and rings and ribbons to tempt a poor girl’s honour while she milked her cows.
This is probably no uncommon story; there must have been many milkmaids whose hats blew off as they milked their cows, and many lords whose hearts leapt at the sight so that they plucked the jewels from their hats and sent their servants to make treaty for them. But it is rare for the girl’s own letters to be preserved or to read her own account of the story as she was made to deliver it at her brother’s inquisition. Yet when we try to use her words to light up the Elizabethan field, the Elizabethan house and living-room, we are met by the usual perplexities. It is easy enough, in spite of the rain and the fog and the floods, to make a fancy piece out of the milkmaid and the meadows and the old woman wandering off to pick up sticks. Elizabethan songwriters have taught us too well the habit of that particular trick. But if we resist the impulse to make museum pieces out of our reading, Mercy herself gives us little help. She was a milkmaid, scribbling love-letters by the light of a farthing dip in an attic. Nevertheless, the sway of the Elizabethan convention was so strong, the accent of their speech was so masterful, that she bears herself with a grace and expresses herself with a resonance that would have done credit to a woman of birth and literary training. When Lord Surrey pressed her to yield she replied:
The thing you wot of, Milord, were a great trespass towards God, a great offence to the world, a great grief to my friends, a great shame to myself, and, as I think, a great dishonour to your lordship. I have heard my father say, Virginity is ye fairest flower in a maid’s garden, and chastity ye richest dowry a poor wench can have… . Chastity, they say, is like unto time, which, being once lost, can no more be recovered[4q].
Words chime and ring in her ears, as if she positively enjoyed the act of writing[1q]. When she wishes him to know that she is only a poor country girl and no fine lady like his wife, she exclaims, “Good Lord, that you should seek after so bare and country stuff abroad, that have so costly and courtly wares at home!” She even breaks into a jog-trot of jingling rhyme, far less sonorous than her prose, but proof that to write was an art, not merely a means of conveying facts. And if she wants to be direct and forcible, the proverbs she has heard in her father’s house come to her pen, the biblical imagery runs in her ears: “And then were I, poor wench, cast up for hawk’s meat, to mine utter undoing, and my friends’ exceeding grief”. In short, Mercy the milkmaid writes a natural and noble style, which is incapable of vulgarity, and equally incapable of intimacy. Nothing, one feels, would have been easier for Mercy than to read her lover a fine discourse upon the vanity of grandeur, the loveliness of chastity, the vicissitudes of fortune. But of emotion as between one particular Mercy and one particular Philip, there is no trace. And when it comes to dealing exactly in a few words with some mean object—when, for example, the wife of Sir Henry Sidney, the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, has to state her claim to a better room to sleep in, she writes for all the world like an illiterate servant girl who can neither form her letters nor spell her words nor make one sentence follow smoothly after another. She haggles, she niggles, she wears our patience down with her repetitions and her prolixities. Hence it comes about that we know very little about Mercy Harvey, the milkmaid, who wrote so well, or Mary Sidney, daughter to the Duke of Northumberland, who wrote so badly. The background of Elizabethan life eludes us.
But let us follow Gabriel Harvey to Cambridge, in case we can there pick up something humble and colloquial that will make these strange Elizabethans more familiar to us. Gabriel, having discharged his duty as a brother, seems to have given himself up to the life of an intellectual young man with his way to make in the world. He worked so hard and he played so little that he made himself unpopular with his fellows. For it was obviously difficult to combine an intense interest in the future of English poetry and the capacity of the English language with card-playing, bear-baiting, and such diversions. Nor could he apparently accept everything that Aristotle said as gospel truth. But with congenial spirits he argued, it is clear, hour by hour, night after night, about poetry, and metre, and the raising of the despised English speech and the meagre English literature to a station among the great tongues and literatures of the world. We are sometimes made to think, as we listen, of such arguments as might now be going forward in the new Universities of America. The young English poets speak with a bold yet uneasy arrogance—“England, since it was England, never bred more honourable minds, more adventurous hearts, more valorous hands, or more excellent wits, than of late”. Yet, to be English is accounted a kind of crime—“nothing is reputed so contemptible and so basely and vilely accounted of as whatsoever is taken for English”. And if, in their hopes for the future and their sensitiveness to the opinion of older civilisations, the Elizabethans show much the same susceptibility that sometimes puzzle us among the younger countries to-day, the sense that broods over them of what is about to happen, of an undiscovered land on which they are about to set foot, is much like the excitement that science stirs in the minds of imaginative English writers of our own time. Yet however stimulating it is to think that we hear the stir and strife of tongues in Cambridge rooms about the year 1570, it has to be admitted that to read Harvey’s pages methodically is almost beyond the limits of human patience. The words seem to run red-hot, molten, hither and thither, until we cry out in anguish for the boon of some meaning to set its stamp on them. He takes the same idea and repeats it over and over again:
In the sovereign workmanship of Nature herself, what garden of flowers without weeds? what orchard of trees without worms? what field of corn without cockle? what pond of fishes without frogs? what sky of light without darkness? what mirror of knowledge without ignorance? what man of earth without frailty? what commodity of the world without discommodity?
It is interminable. As we go round and round like a horse in a mill, we perceive that we are thus clogged with sound because we are reading what we should be hearing. The amplifications and the repetitions, the emphasis like that of a fist pounding the edge of a pulpit, are for the benefit of the slow and sensual ear which loves to dally over sense and luxuriate in sound—the ear which brings in, along with the spoken word, the look of the speaker and his gestures, which gives a dramatic value to what he says and adds to the crest of an extravagance some modulation which makes the word wing its way to the precise spot aimed at in the hearer’s heart. Hence, when we lay Harvey’s diatribes against Nash or his letters to Spenser upon poetry under the light of the eye alone, we can hardly make headway and lose our sense of any definite direction. We grasp any simple fact that floats to the surface as a drowning man grasps a plank—that the carrier was called Mrs. Kerke, that Perne kept a cub for his pleasure in his rooms at Peterhouse; that “Your last letter … was delivered me at mine hostesses by the fireside, being fast hedged in round about on every side with a company of honest, good fellows, and at that time reasonable, honest quaffers”; that Greene died begging Mistress Isam “for a penny pot of Malmsey”, had borrowed her husband’s shirt when his own was awashing, and was buried yesterday in the new churchyard near Bedlam at a cost of six shillings and fourpence. Light seems to dawn upon the darkness. But no; just as we think to lay hands on Shakespeare’s coat-tails, to hear the very words rapped out as Spenser spoke them, up rise the fumes of Harvey’s eloquence and we are floated off again into disputation and eloquence, windy, wordy, voluminous, and obsolete. How, we ask, as we slither over the pages, can we ever hope to come to grips with these Elizabethans? And then, turning, skipping and glancing, something fitfully and doubtfully emerges from the violent pages, the voluminous arguments—the figure of a man, the outlines of a face, somebody who is not “an Elizabethan” but an interesting, complex, and individual human being.
We know him, to begin with, from his dealings with his sister. We see him riding to Cambridge, a fellow of his college, when she was milking with poor old women in the fields. We observe with amusement his sense of the conduct that befits the sister of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge scholar. Education had put a great gulf between him and his family. He rode to Cambridge from a house in a village street where his father made ropes and his mother worked in the malthouse. Yet though his lowly birth and the consciousness that he had his way to make in the world made him severe with his sister, fawning to the great, uneasy and self-centred and ostentatious, it never made him ashamed of his family. The father who could send three sons to Cambridge and was so little ashamed of his craft that he had himself carved making ropes at his work and the carving let in above his fireplace, was no ordinary man. The brothers who followed Gabriel to Cambridge and were his best allies there, were brothers to be proud of. He could be proud of Mercy even, whose beauty could make a great nobleman pluck the jewel from his hat. He was undoubtedly proud of himself. It was the pride of a self-made man who must read when other people are playing cards, who owns no undue allegiance to authority and will contradict Aristotle himself, that made him unpopular at Cambridge and almost cost him his degree. But it was an unfortunate chance that led him thus early in life to defend his rights and insist upon his merits. Moreover, since it was true—since he was abler, quicker, and more learned than other people, handsome in person too, as even his enemies could not deny (“a smudge piece of a handsome fellow it hath been in his days” Nash admitted) he had reason to think that he deserved success and was denied it only by the jealousies and conspiracies of his colleagues. For a time, by dint of much caballing and much dwelling upon his own deserts, he triumphed over his enemies in the matter of the degree. He delivered lectures. He was asked to dispute before the court when Queen Elizabeth came to Audley End. He even drew her favourable attention. “He lookt something like an Italian”, she said when he was brought to her notice. But the seeds of his downfall were visible even in his moment of triumph. He had no self-respect, no self-control. He made himself ridiculous and his friends uneasy. When we read how he dressed himself up and “came ruffling it out huffty tuffty in his suit of velvet” how uneasy he was, at one moment cringing, at another “making no bones to take the wall of Sir Phillip Sidney”, now flirting with the ladies, now “putting bawdy riddles to them”, how when the Queen praised him he was beside himself with joy and talked the English of Saffron Walden with an Italian accent, we can imagine how his enemies jeered and his friends blushed. And so, for all his merits, his decline began. He was not taken into Lord Leicester’s service; he was not made Public Orator; he was not given the Mastership of Trinity Hall. But there was one society in which he succeeded. In the small, smoky rooms where Spenser and other young men discussed poetry and language and the future of English literature, Harvey was not laughed at. Harvey, on the contrary, was taken very seriously. To friends like these he seemed as capable of greatness as any of them. He too might be one of those destined to make English literature illustrious. His passion for poetry was disinterested. His leaning was profound. When he held forth upon quantity and metre, upon what the Greeks had written and the Italians, and what the English might write, no doubt he created for Spenser that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young writer and to make each fresh poem as it is written seem the common property of a little band of adventurers set upon the same quest. It was thus that Spenser saw him:
Harvey, the happy above happiest men, I read: that, sitting like a looker-on Of this world’s stage, doest note, with critic pen, The sharp dislikes of each condition.
Poets need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle; who warns; who foresees. It must have been pleasant for Spenser to listen as Harvey talked; and then to cease to listen, to let the vehement, truculent voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and made up a few lines of his own poetry in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tight to accommodate the formlessness of life. Thus when Harvey ceased to theorise and tried to practise there issued nothing but a thin dribble of arid and unappetising verse or a copious flow of unctuous and servile eulogy. He failed to be a poet as he failed to be a statesman, as he failed to be a professor, as he failed to be a Master, as he failed, it might seem, in everything that he undertook, save that he had won the friendship of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.
But, happily, Harvey left behind him a commonplace book; he had the habit of making notes in the margins of books as he read. Looking from one to the other, from his public self to his private, we see his face lit from both sides, and the expression changes as it changes so seldom upon the face of the Elizabethans. We detect another Harvey lurking behind the superficial Harvey, shading him with doubt and effort and despondency. For, luckily, the commonplace book was small; the margins even of an Elizabethan folio narrow; Harvey was forced to be brief, and because he wrote only for his own eye at the command of some sharp memory or experience he seems to write as if he were talking to himself. That is true, he seems to say; or that reminds me, or again: If only I had done this—We thus become aware of a conflict between the Harvey who blundered among men and the Harvey who sat wisely at home among his books. The one who acts and suffers brings his case to the one who reads and thinks for advice and consolation.
Indeed, he had need of both. From the first his life was full of conflict and difficulty. Harvey the rope-maker’s son might put a brave face on it, but still in the society of gentlemen the lowness of his birth galled him. Think, then, the sedentary Harvey counselled him, of all those unknown people who have nevertheless triumphed. Think of “Alexander, an Unexpert Youth”; think of David, “a forward stripling, but vanquished a huge Giant”; think of Judith and of Pope Joan and their exploits; think, above all, of that “gallant virago … Joan of Arc, a most worthy, valiant young wench … what may not an industrious and politic man do … when a lusty adventurous wench might thus prevail?” And then it seems as if the smart young men at Cambridge twitted the rope-maker’s son for his lack of skill in the gentlemanly arts. “Leave writing”, Gabriel counselled him, “which consumeth unreasonable much time… . You have already plagued yourself this way”. Make yourself master of the arts of eloquence and persuasion. Go into the world. Learn swordsmanship, riding, and shooting. All three may be learnt in a week. And then the ambitious but uneasy youth began to find the other sex attractive and asked advice of his wise and sedentary brother in the conduct of his love affairs. Manners, the other Harvey was of opinion, are of the utmost importance in dealing with women; one must be discreet, self-controlled. A gentleman, this counsellor continued, is known by his “Good entertainment of Ladies and gentlewomen. No salutation, without much respect and ceremony”—a reflection inspired no doubt by the memory of some snub received at Audley End. Health and the care of the body are of the utmost importance. “We scholars make an Ass of our body and wit”. One must “leap out of bed lustily, every morning in ye whole year”. One must be sparing in one’s diet, and active, and take regular exercise, like brother H., “who never failed to breathe his hound once a day at least”. There must be no “buzzing or musing”. A learned man must also be a man of the world. Make it your “daily charge” “to exercise, to laugh; to proceed boldly”. And if your tormentors brawl and rail and scoff and mock at you, the best answer is “a witty and pleasant Ironie”. In any case, do not complain, “It is gross folly, and a vile Sign of a wayward and forward disposition, to be eftsoons complaining of this, or that, to small purpose”. And if as time goes on without preferment, one cannot pay one’s bills, one is thrust into prison, one has to bear the taunts and insults of landladies, still remember “Glad poverty is no poverty”; and if, as time passes and the struggle increases, it seems as if “Life is warfare”, if sometimes the beaten man has to own, “But for hope ye Hart would brust”, still his sage counsellor in the study will not let him throw up the sponge. “He beareth his misery best, that hideth it most” he told himself.
So runs the dialogue that we invent between the two Harveys—Harvey the active and Harvey the passive, Harvey the foolish and Harvey the wise. And it seems on the surface that the two halves, for all their counselling together, made but a sorry business of the whole. For the young man who had ridden off to Cambridge full of conceit and hope and good advice to his sister returned empty-handed to his native village in the end. He dwindled out his last long years in complete obscurity at Saffron Walden. He occupied himself superficially by practising his skill as a doctor among the poor of the neighbourhood. He lived in the utmost poverty off buttered roots and sheep’s trotters. But even so he had his consolations, he cherished his dreams. As he pottered about his garden in the old black velvet suit, purloined, Nash says, from a saddle for which he had not paid, his thoughts were all of power and glory; of Stukeley and Drake; of “the winners of gold and the wearers of gold”. Memories he had in abundance—“The remembrance of best things will soon pass out of memory; if it be not often renewed and revived”, he wrote. But there was some eager stir in him, some lust for action and glory and life and adventure that forbade him to dwell in the past. “The present tense only to be regarded” is one of his notes. Nor did he drug himself with the dust of scholarship. Books he loved as a true reader loves them, not as trophies to be hung up for display, but as living beings that “must be meditated, practised and incorporated into my body and soul”. A singularly humane view of learning survived in the breast of the old and disappointed scholar. “The only brave way to learn all things with no study and much pleasure”, he remarked. Dreams of the winners of gold and the wearers of gold, dreams of action and power, fantastic though they were in an old beggar who could not pay his reckoning, who pressed simples and lived off buttered roots in a cottage, kept life in him when his flesh had withered and his skin was “riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment”. He had his triumph in the end. He survived both his friends and his enemies—Spenser and Sidney, Nash and Perne. He lived to a very great age for an Elizabethan, to eighty-one or eighty-two; and when we say that Harvey lived we mean that he quarrelled and was tiresome and ridiculous and struggled and failed and had a face like ours—a changing, a variable, a human face.
