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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Virginia Woolf's collection of essays, titled 'The Greatest Essays of Virginia Woolf', offers readers a unique insight into the mind of one of the most prominent modernist writers of the 20th century. Woolf's literary style is characterized by its experimental nature, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and deep exploration of themes such as gender, psychology, and the human experience. This collection showcases Woolf's brilliant prose and her sharp observations on art, politics, and society, making it a must-read for fans of literary essays. Woolf's essays are not only thought-provoking but also serve as important contributions to the feminist literary canon, redefining the role of women writers in the literary world. Her essays are both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, making them a valuable addition to any reader's library. Virginia Woolf's 'The Greatest Essays of Virginia Woolf' is a timeless masterpiece that continues to inspire and engage readers with its profound insights and innovative literary techniques. 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 Greatest Essays of Virginia Woolf
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers a concentrated portrait of Virginia Woolf as a critic and essayist, uniting the book-length gathering The Common Reader with three influential shorter pieces: The Modern Essay, Henry James, and Middlebrow. Its purpose is not to survey every corner of her career but to bring into focus the voice through which she thought about reading, tradition, and the art of prose. By placing a full collection beside individual essays, the volume allows readers to see Woolf’s methods in both sustained and focused forms, and to appreciate how her criticism opens a conversation between past literature and present sensibility.
Woolf wrote across many genres: novels, short stories, essays, literary journalism, and biographical and autobiographical writings, while also keeping diaries and extensive correspondence. The present volume concentrates on her essays, the form through which she most directly addressed other writers and the craft of writing. These essays belong to a tradition of English prose that values clarity, wit, and personal presence, while remaining attentive to history and form. They show how Woolf drew upon experience as a novelist and reviewer to produce criticism that is as much art as argument, hospitable to the general reader and exacting for the specialist.
The Common Reader stands at the center of this selection, a sequence of essays that maps a broad, idiosyncratic history of reading. It moves among authors, periods, and problems, pairing literary portraits with reflections on how books are encountered in daily life. Woolf writes as a non-specialist in the best sense: curious, alert to pleasure, and willing to test reputation against lived response. The collection frames criticism as an activity rooted in attention rather than doctrine, making room for sympathy, dissent, and delight while tracing connections between writers and the conditions—social, material, and imaginative—that shape their work.
The Modern Essay offers Woolf’s most concise meditation on the possibilities of the essay form. She considers what distinguishes essays that endure from those that merely inform, and she weighs the balance between personality and subject, ornament and truthfulness. Without dictating rules, she specifies pressures that any essayist must negotiate: the need to engage the reader, the obligation to precision, and the lure of style for its own sake. The piece thus serves as an ars poetica for this volume, clarifying the standards by which Woolf judges and the aspirations she pursues in her own prose.
Henry James turns from form to a single writer’s achievement, examining the temperament, technique, and ambition that animate James’s fiction. Woolf registers the discipline of his art and the intricacy of his sentences, while assessing what such discipline can accomplish and what it might overlook. In doing so, she sketches a broader account of how the modern novel came to value nuance, interiority, and design. The essay shows her at once as heir and critic, acknowledging influence while measuring distance, attentive to how one writer’s solutions open possibilities for others and set new limits.
Middlebrow addresses the cultural taxonomy that divides reading into low, middle, and high. Woolf probes the assumptions behind these labels and satirizes the social anxieties that cling to them. The piece advocates for vitality and independence in taste, resisting both condescension and complacency. By questioning how readers are classified, she defends the autonomy of the individual encounter with books. The essay’s playful surface conceals a serious claim: literature thrives when released from rigid hierarchies and when readers meet works with honesty, curiosity, and the courage to form their own judgments.
Across these works, several concerns recur. Woolf asks what it means to read well, how tradition influences the present, and how the life of the mind is shaped by everyday circumstances. She attends to the relation between private impression and public judgment, insisting that feeling and intelligence need not be adversaries. She values the writer’s craft while reserving the final test for the experience of reading. Above all, she treats literature as a living network of voices, where influence flows in many directions and where the task of criticism is to keep conversation active, nuanced, and hospitable to discovery.
Her style is unmistakable: poised yet exploratory, lyrical without abandoning analysis. Sentences gather momentum through rhythm and association, but always return to the precise detail that anchors a claim. Digression becomes a method, a way to test alternatives and to register competing tones—sympathy, skepticism, amusement—within a single page. Irony sharpens without wounding; metaphor illuminates without obscuring. The critic’s “I” is present, not as an authority that silences debate, but as a companionable intelligence inviting the reader to think alongside her, to revise, to question, and to delight in the play of ideas.
Method accompanies style. Woolf often approaches a writer through biography and historical circumstance, yet she resists reducing art to origins. She observes how rooms, tools, and time shape an author’s possibilities, and she recognizes how conventions both enable and confine. Her criticism seeks to broaden attention beyond a narrow canon, attuned to overlooked forms and to the conditions that allow or prevent certain voices from being heard. These concerns link her critical practice with her broader commitments, including the place of women in literary history and the material supports that make sustained creative work possible.
The significance of these essays is lasting because they redefine criticism as a mode of creative reading. They teach habits of attention: how to notice structure, tone, and texture; how to place a work within a lineage without surrendering to it; how to separate fashion from achievement. They also model intellectual honesty, acknowledging uncertainty and revising judgments in light of further reflection. For readers, students, and writers, Woolf offers criteria that endure without hardening into formula, and a manner that finds room for pleasure, argument, and the slow accumulation of insight.
The scope of this volume is deliberately focused. It does not present the entirety of Woolf’s nonfiction, nor does it seek to be definitive. Instead, it brings together one expansive collection with three essays that frame, test, and extend its concerns. The result is a composite portrait of the essayist at work in different registers: the panoramic survey, the reflection on form, the critical portrait, and the cultural polemic. Readers encounter multiple text types within the essay tradition and can trace how a consistent sensibility adapts itself to varied occasions and demands.
These works invite a flexible approach to reading. One may proceed in sequence or turn first to an essay that speaks to an immediate curiosity, then return to The Common Reader for context and companionship. However arranged, the pieces sustain a conversation about why books matter and how best to meet them. They offer guidance without dogma and make a case for criticism as a humane practice open to all. In assembling them here, the aim is simple: to place Woolf’s clearest statements about reading within easy reach, and to let their intelligence and generosity continue their work.
Author Biography
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic, a central architect of literary modernism. Active from the Edwardian years through the interwar period, she helped redefine how readers think about narrative, consciousness, and the essay. Alongside her fiction, she produced a sustained body of criticism that examined how and why we read. The books in this collection—The Common Reader, The Modern Essay, Henry James, and Middlebrow—capture her range: generous literary history, rigorous formal analysis, and lively cultural debate. Across these works she speaks to both specialists and lay readers, insisting that literature remains a living art shaped by attention, tact, and independence.
Her education was largely conducted at home; in the late 1890s she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where studies in classics and history deepened her sense of literary tradition. Early in the twentieth century she became a reviewer, contributing essays and notices to periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement. This apprenticeship honed a style that balances nuance with clarity. Woolf's circle, often associated with the Bloomsbury Group, encouraged experiment, candor, and intellectual liberty, ideals that informed her critical voice. She read widely in English and European literature and engaged ongoing debates about realism, form, and the social life of books.
From this foundation emerged The Common Reader, published in two series in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Woolf's 'common reader' is neither academic nor naive, but an attentive, curious person who reads for delight and discrimination. In these essays she moves across centuries—classical writers, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, the Victorians, and contemporaries—showing how styles and sensibilities change while the pleasures of reading endure. She revives neglected figures, questions received judgments, and writes with metaphoric verve that makes criticism feel exploratory rather than doctrinaire. The Common Reader exemplifies her belief that criticism should invite readers into conversation, enlarging sympathy without sacrificing standards of taste and craft.
In The Modern Essay Woolf reflects on a form she practiced with distinction. Surveying recent writing, she argues that the essay should create a single, vivid impression and be shaped by an active, discerning mind. She favors concision, freshness, and a measured presence of the authorial self, resisting both pedantry and empty performance. The piece links contemporary practice to a longer lineage while pressing for renewal: the best essays, she suggests, awaken attention and leave an afterglow of thought. Her remarks became touchstones for later critics and practitioners, clarifying standards without turning them into rigid rules.
In Henry James, Woolf offers a study of craft and temperament. She considers how James organizes perception, tracks consciousness, and composes sentences that register minute shifts of feeling. Woolf situates him within the evolution of the novel, noting his experiments with point of view and structure. Her assessment balances admiration with scrutiny, distinguishing accomplishment from mannerism. By reading James closely, she also defines her own critical commitments: flexibility, precision, and an alertness to the relation between form and experience. The essay exemplifies her ability to write about major figures without deference or dismissal, opening space for renewed engagement.
Middlebrow addresses the cultural taxonomy that divides 'highbrow' from 'lowbrow' and fixes 'middlebrow' uneasily between. Woolf's argument is mischievous yet serious: labels that convert art into social currency impoverish both creators and readers. She defends authenticity, play, and uncoerced judgment, aligning this stance with the 'common reader' ideal. The position was sustained by her editorial independence: in the late 1910s she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which enabled publication outside conventional channels and fostered modernist experimentation. Middlebrow thus extends her broader critique of status and conformity, urging a culture in which curiosity, not prestige, guides taste.
Through the 1930s Woolf continued to write essays and reviews, refining an approach that links style to ethics—how we read as a way of how we live. She died in 1941, leaving a body of criticism that remains accessible yet exacting. The Common Reader still invites discovery, pairing sympathetic portraits with sharp revaluations. The Modern Essay articulates principles that shape contemporary nonfiction. Henry James models lucid, unsentimental homage to a precursor. Middlebrow keeps alive debates about culture, class, and independence. Across these works, Woolf's legacy endures in the classroom and the common reader's armchair alike, sustaining a vibrant conversation about literature and life.
Historical Context
Virginia Woolf’s essays in this collection were shaped by the long transition from late Victorian culture to the interwar decades. Born in 1882 and active until her death in 1941, Woolf wrote amid the upheavals of the First World War, the expansion of mass education, and the consolidation of modernist art. The Common Reader (first series, 1925; second series, 1932) gathers her literary-historical reflections for a wide public. The Modern Essay (1925) evaluates the form’s lineage and contemporary practice. Henry James appears in the 1932 series, assessing a predecessor central to psychological fiction. Middlebrow was written in 1932 and published posthumously in 1942, intervening in interwar cultural debates.
The “common reader” Woolf addresses emerged from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reforms that enlarged Britain’s reading public. Elementary education expanded after the Education Acts of 1870 and 1902; public access to books widened with the Public Libraries Acts (from 1850, extended in 1919). Cheap series such as Everyman’s Library (founded 1906) and increasingly affordable periodicals fostered non-specialist reading. Woolf’s invocation of Samuel Johnson’s phrase “the common reader” acknowledges this democratization while insisting on alert, independent judgment. Her essays presuppose a world in which knowledge circulates beyond universities, and in which a literate citizenry claims authority to interpret the past and evaluate contemporary literature.
The periodical press was the chief arena for literary argument from the 1890s through the 1930s. Woolf began as a reviewer, contributing numerous (often unsigned) pieces to the Times Literary Supplement, founded in 1902. New weeklies such as the Nation (1907) and the New Statesman (1913) provided forums where criticism, politics, and social questions mingled. The essay thrived in these outlets, shaped by column lengths and deadlines but sustained by a lively conversation among writers and readers. The Modern Essay reflects on this ecology, testing how a tradition that runs from Montaigne through Addison and Lamb could adapt to the conditions of modern journalism.
Woolf’s affiliation with the Bloomsbury Group framed her intellectual independence. Centered in London and connected to Cambridge networks, Bloomsbury included figures such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, known for liberal politics and experimental aesthetics. In 1917 Virginia and Leonard Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, a handpress that granted them control over format, typography, and content. Hogarth published works by contemporaries, including the British book edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), and began English translations of Sigmund Freud in the mid-1920s. This small-press autonomy strengthened Woolf’s confidence in the essay as an art of personal authority.
The Common Reader (1925) appeared in a Britain recalibrating its cultural inheritance after the First World War. Woolf assembled studies that move freely across periods—on Defoe, Austen, the Elizabethans, and Montaigne—while sustaining the layperson’s perspective. The title draws on Johnson’s invocation of a reader who is neither scholar nor critic, yet attentive and historically curious. The volume’s method—close reading allied to quick historical sketches—mirrored a postwar appetite for reassessing tradition without institutional gatekeeping. It addressed an audience formed by libraries, adult education, and affordable reprints, inviting readers to test the canon against experience and pleasure.
Questions of education and access inform several essays, notably On Not Knowing Greek (1925). Classical learning had long marked elite schooling, yet women’s formal admission to degrees lagged: Oxford granted women full degrees in 1920, Cambridge not until 1948. Meanwhile, the Workers’ Educational Association (founded 1903) and series like the Loeb Classical Library (begun 1911) broadened access to ancient texts. Woolf’s reflections weigh the authority of tradition against barriers that kept many outside institutional classrooms. Her argument relies on a historical moment when translations, evening lectures, and public libraries allowed non-specialists to claim a share in classical culture.
The Modern Essay surveys the form’s English lineage while diagnosing the pressures of contemporary print culture. Woolf looks back to Bacon, Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers, Hazlitt and Lamb, and later stylists such as Pater and Beerbohm. She insists that essays succeed by conveying an individual temperament rather than by displaying learning. Yet she notes how modern magazine conditions—space limits, deadlines, and an overproduction of copy—threaten mannered sameness or journalistic padding. Her perspective belongs to an age of faster communications and expanding periodical markets, where the essay’s freedom must be protected from both pedantry and commercial formula.
Woolf’s Henry James essay (in The Common Reader, Second Series, 1932) enters a transatlantic reassessment of James after his death in 1916. James had become a British subject in 1915, emblematic of cultural exchange between Britain and the United States. His New York Edition (1907–1909) had established a self-curated canon of his work. In the 1920s, critics such as T. S. Eliot renewed interest in James’s art of consciousness. Woolf situates James as a pivotal figure moving the novel from external description to inward perception, weighing the achievement of the late style against the demands of narrative hospitality to ordinary readers.
The shift from Victorian realism to modernist experimentation underlies Woolf’s treatment of James. The late nineteenth century saw the collapse of the three-volume “triple-decker” novel and the rise of magazines and single-volume editions, altering both pace and audience. Early twentieth-century writers cultivated free indirect discourse and interior monologue to capture subjective experience. Woolf’s criticism (alongside her 1924 essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown) contrasts material detail with the elusive life of consciousness. In Henry James she measures a predecessor’s technical daring, while mapping a lineage for her generation’s effort to refresh narrative form after the upheaval of war.
Middlebrow (written 1932; published 1942) belongs to an interwar debate over cultural hierarchies compressed into the labels highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. “Middlebrow” spread in the 1920s to describe respectable, aspirational mass culture. Institutions such as the BBC (founded 1922), subscription libraries like Boots Booklovers’ Library (founded 1899), and new book clubs (the Book Society began in 1929) mediated taste for a large audience. Woolf’s open letter, addressed to a weekly editor, challenges the idea that cultural value can be measured by social aspiration or convenience, defending difficult art without ceding it to mere snobbery.
Economic turbulence shaped the literary marketplace that Woolf anatomized. After the costs and losses of the First World War came the 1926 General Strike and, from 1929, global depression. Publishers experimented with prices and formats to retain readers, and public libraries grew in importance as purchasing power fell. Later in the decade Penguin Books (founded 1935) accelerated the spread of inexpensive paperbacks. Woolf’s essays interrogate what “value” means when distribution widens and prices drop: she calls for standards grounded in attentive reading rather than in sales figures, resale lists, or the lending library’s circulation metrics.
Woolf’s cosmopolitan criticism was nourished by a translation boom that altered British reading habits. Constance Garnett’s translations of Russian fiction (from the 1890s through the 1920s) helped ignite a British fascination with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The Common Reader includes The Russian Point of View (1925), where Woolf weighs this influx against English narrative traditions. Meanwhile, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translation of Proust began appearing in 1922, further unsettling notions of plot and memory. These international currents reinforced Woolf’s emphasis on inner life and on the essay as a mobile form of comparative literary history.
Technological and media changes also shaped the stakes of Woolf’s criticism. Radio broadcasting normalized cultural talk for mass audiences, and cinema established new habits of attention; advertising and publicity intensified around books and authors. Woolf worried that such mechanisms could flatten distinctions or reward safe consensus. Yet she embraced technologies that enhanced independence: the craft printing of the Hogarth Press, for instance, countered standardization with material variety and editorial autonomy. Within this environment The Modern Essay and Middlebrow advocate a vigilant, discriminating readership capable of resisting both academic jargon and the smoothing pressures of mass entertainment.
Interwar politics shadow the essays’ cultural claims. The League of Nations embodied hopes for international cooperation even as nationalism and authoritarianism grew. In the 1930s, the rise of fascism in Europe and the Spanish Civil War sharpened British debates about propaganda, pacifism, and the responsibilities of intellectuals. Woolf’s later polemics, such as Three Guineas (1938), explicitly confront such questions; the essays gathered here prepare the ground by probing conformity, authority, and the uses of culture. Middlebrow, in particular, queries whether a centrally broadcast or committee-managed culture can foster independence of mind.
National identity and imperial change formed an unsettled backdrop. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) redrew borders; the Irish Free State was established in 1922; and British imperial debates intensified around governance and reform. In this fluid setting The Common Reader revisits English literary origins—Chaucer, Shakespeare’s heirs, the Augustans—not as a fixed inheritance but as a living resource. The James essay adds a transatlantic dimension, noting how a writer born American and naturalized British could refine “Englishness” from the margins. Woolf’s critical method registers both continuity and displacement within the literary nation during an era of political reconfiguration.
The institutional life of letters changed as professional criticism expanded. University English departments grew, journals multiplied, and new canons were proposed. Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) analyzed the marketplace’s effects on taste, complementing and contesting claims like Woolf’s. PEN International (founded 1921) linked writers across borders in defense of literary freedoms. Against this backdrop The Modern Essay defends the essayist’s idiosyncratic authority, while The Common Reader dramatizes how non-specialist criticism can coexist with academic methods—each checking the other’s blind spots in a rapidly professionalizing field.
Reception confirms that Woolf’s essays consolidated her authority as a critic as well as a novelist. The Common Reader (1925) was widely praised for stylistic poise and range; the 1932 second series strengthened that reputation and reached a growing audience of general readers. Her Henry James essay joined a broader, favorable revaluation of James in the 1920s and 1930s. Middlebrow, appearing posthumously in 1942, later became a touchstone for discussions of cultural hierarchy. Postwar decades saw renewed interest in James (notably mid-century biographies) and in Woolf’s criticism, which has been revisited by book historians and scholars of modernism and media culture since the 1990s.
Synopsis (Selection)
THE COMMON READER
An inviting suite of literary reflections, this work explores how an attentive, everyday reader encounters authors across periods and styles, treating reading as a living, democratic activity. Woolf balances erudition with curiosity, tracing how voice, form, and historical context shape readerly pleasure while revaluing overlooked figures alongside the canon. Conversational yet incisive, it foregrounds her signature belief that personal, alert criticism can illuminate both art and ordinary life.
THE MODERN ESSAY
A focused meditation on craft, this piece argues that the best essays are fresh, exact, and alive to the quick movements of a mind seeking truth rather than showing off. Woolf critiques secondhand rhetoric and complacent polish, urging writers to capture the specific and fleeting without losing shape or clarity. Brisk and exacting in tone, it outlines a poetics of nonfiction that underpins her agile, reader-centered criticism elsewhere.
HENRY JAMES
This critical portrait weighs Henry James’s mastery of psychological nuance and formal control against the costs such refinement can impose. Woolf clarifies how his carefully built atmospheres demand a particular attentiveness, considering what his method gains in depth and what it might sacrifice in breadth. Respectful yet probing, the essay models her balanced approach to literary evaluation and her broader preoccupation with the relations among consciousness, form, and lived reality.
MIDDLEBROW
A cultural polemic, this essay dissects how status anxiety and safe taste can flatten art into social currency, turning literature into an instrument of respectability. Woolf contrasts genuine, risk-taking engagement with art against the drive for improvement and approval, urging independence of mind for both writers and readers. Witty and provocative, it links aesthetics to ethics and echoes her recurring defense of artistic integrity and readerly autonomy.
The Greatest Essays of Virginia Woolf
THE COMMON READER
There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. ” … I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.
The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar[1q]. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.
“JANE EYRE” AND “WUTHERING HEIGHTS”
Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Bronte was born, she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed from us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour of established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the ‘fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open JAYNE EYRE once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open JAYNE EYRE; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to think of JAYNE EYRE. Think of the moor, and again there is JAYNE EYRE. Think of the drawing-room, [Note, below] even, those “white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and fire”—what is all that except JAYNE EYRE?
[Note: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of colour.
“… we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers ” (WUTHERING HEIGHTS).
“Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire” (JANE EYRE).]
The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is more akin to Charlotte Bronte in the power of his personality and the narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read JUDE THE OBSCURE we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as they are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace. She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”.
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own.
Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many books.
She never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female”, she writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written; but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’
very hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel VILLETTE. “The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation-they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather a mood than a particular observation. WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a more difficult book to understand than JAYNE EYRE, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love “, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in WUTHERING HEIGHTS. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race ” and “you, the eternal powers …” the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and HE remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem part of it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the dead. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of comparing WUTHERING HEIGHTS with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS
Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds on these occasions the one thing needful: “And be sure you choose your patron wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable man.
But who, then, is the desirable man—the patron who will cajole the best out of the writer’s brain and bring to birth the most varied and vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly, chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public. The eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit and Grub Street bookseller. In the nineteenth century the great writers wrote for the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes. And looking back and applauding the splendid results of these different alliances, it all seems enviably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with our own predicament—for whom should we write? For the present supply of patrons is of unexampled and bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public and the American public; the best-seller public and the worst-seller public; the highbrow public and the red-blood public; all now organised self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is futile to say, “Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus”, because writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.
Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public, accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it—an uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession, gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses, in consequence, are tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the flattering proposals which the editors of the Times and the Daily News may be supposed to make us—“Twenty pounds down for your crocus in precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every breakfast table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before nine o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name attached”?
But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one’s name attached to it?
The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens early in March every year. The newspaper crocus is an amazing but still a very different plant. It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow. It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too, for let nobody think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the Times or of Mr. Lynd of the Daily News is an easy one. It is no despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o’clock in the morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is unreadable.
The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd, this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of authorship.
To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of the modern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated, while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on the piano, have not appreciably improved upon ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way—elementary and disputable. The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so much—atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics, and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of literature depends upon their happy alliance—all of which proves, as we began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the questions.
THE MODERN ESSAY
As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little volumes, [MODEM ENGLISH ESSAYS, edited by Ernest Rhys, 5 vols. (Dent).] containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review something like the progress of history.
Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure[3q]; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end[5q]. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world[2q].
