Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

But although much has been said of her habit of describing actual people, and introducing scenes which had happened to her, the vividness of the result is not so easy to analyse. She had both an abnormal sensibility which made every figure and incident strike its pattern upon her mind, and also an extraordinary tenacity and toughness of purpose which drove her to test and investigate these impressions to the last ounce of them. ‘I could never’, she writes, ‘rest in communication with strong discreet and refined minds, whether male or female, 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 by the ‘heart’s very hearthstone’ that she begins her writing, with the light of it glowing on her page. Indeed, her production, whatever its faults, always seems to issue from a deep place where the fire is eternal. The peculiar virtues of her style, its character, its speed, its colour and strength, seem all of her own forging and to owe nothing to literary instruction or to the reading of many books. The smoothness of the professional writer, his ability to stuff out and sway his language as he chooses, was never learnt by her. She remains always unsophisticated, but with a power through sheer force of meaning of creating the word she needs and winging her way with a rhythm of her own. This mastery over language grew as she gained maturity as an artist; and in Villette , the last and greatest of her works, she is mistress not only of a strong and individual style, but of a style that is both variable and splendid. We are made to remember, too, her long toil with brush and pencil, for she has a strange gift, rare in a writer, of rendering the quality of colour and of texture in words, and thus investing many of her scenes with a curious brilliance and solidity.

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 moulding 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.

We not only see that, we can almost touch it. She never heaps her colours, but lays a blue or a purple or her favourite crimson so rightly on the page that they paint the sentence as with actual pigment. Naturally, therefore, we should expect to find her a great landscape painter, a great lover of the air and the sky and all the pageant that lies between earth and heaven; nor may a student of hers tell whether he cares more for her people or for the keen air and the scent of the moor and the ‘plumes of the storm’ which surround them with such light and atmosphere, and such overwhelming poetry. Her descriptions, too, are not separate visions, as they tend to be so often with writers of less powerful gift, but work themselves into the heart of the book.

It was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide on each side there were only fields where no cattle now browsed, and the little brown birds which stirred occasionally looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.

How beautifully that spreads the mood of the moment over the face of the land!

But these are the details of a great literary gift. We go back to her books and sometimes this quality strikes us and sometimes that. But all the while we are conscious of something that is greater than one gift or another and is perhaps the quality that attaches us to books as to people – the quality, that is, of the writer’s mind and personality. With their limitations and their great beauty these are stamped upon every page that Charlotte Brontë wrote. We do not need to know her story, or to have climbed the steep hill and gazed upon the stone house among the graves to feel her tremendous honesty and courage, and to know that she loved liberty and independence and the splendour of wild country, and men and women who are above all things passionate and true-minded. These are part of her as her imagination and genius are part of her; and they add to our admiration of her as a writer some peculiar warmth of feeling which makes us desire, when there is any question of doing her honour, to rise and salute her not only as a writer of genius, but as a very noble human being.

Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connexion whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated, solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

In spite of all this, we can easily conjure up a picture which does service for the bookish man and raises a smile at his expense. We conceive a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the secondhand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight – a delightful character, no doubt, in his crabbed simplicity, but not in the least resembling that other to whom we would direct attention. For the true reader is essentially young. He is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study; he trudges the high road, he climbs higher and higher upon the hills until the atmosphere is almost too fine to breathe in; to him it is not a sedentary pursuit at all.

But, apart from general statements, it would not be hard to prove by an assembly of facts that the great season for reading is the season between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. The bare list of what is read then fills the heart of older people with despair. It is not only that we read so many books, but that we had such books to read. If we wish to refresh our memories, let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. We will quote a list of the books that some one read in a past January at the age of twenty, most of them probably for the first time. 1. Rhoda Fleming . 2. The Shaving of Shagpat . 3. Tom Jones . 4. The Laodicean . 5. Dewey’s Psychology . 6. The Book of Job. 7. Webbe’s Discourse of Poesie . 8. The Duchess of Malfi . 9. The Revenger’s Tragedy . And so he goes on from month to month, until, as such lists will, it suddenly stops in the month of June. But if we follow the reader through his months it is clear that he can have done practically nothing but read. Elizabethan literature is gone through with some thoroughness; he reads a great deal of Webster, Browning, Shelley, Spenser, and Congreve; Peacock he read from start to finish; and most of Jane Austen’s novels two or three times over. He read the whole of Meredith, the whole of Ibsen, and a little of Bernard Shaw. We may be fairly certain, too, that the time not spent in reading was spent in some stupendous argument in which the Greeks were pitted against the modern, romance against realism, Racine against Shakespeare, until the lights were seen to have grown pale in the dawn.