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Reality and Virginia Woolf
Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian
When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, 'subject to the same skyey influences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.
The same conception of a high Shakespearean selflessness extends backward in time through Coleridge and Elizabeth Montagu; the poetic ideal of self-annihilation in the service of the sympathetic imagination is found in Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, and Shaftesbury, for whom its ideal practitioner is Homer.
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It is doubtful that Woolf explicitly based her ideas on Shaftesbury, or even on Coleridge or Keats. But the past is always echoing.
4
The past echoes, because she never stops reading the past. Woolf's critical essays make up a considerable part of her achievement, and a considerable contribution in the history of criticism. It is not true that the essays are superior to the novels, but they have a sustained perfection that the novels do not match. The novels are not always consistent; Woolf's two great weaknesses as a writer of fiction, her difficulties with dialogue and with dramatic tension, cannot always be hidden, in the first place, or dodged with feigned indifference, in the second. The third part of To the Lighthouse is too explicit and cannot keep pace with its suddenly accelerated symbolism; it is too skittish of missing profundity, and so makes us swallow profundity whole. The Waves is often too lavish with its own devices, and puts forth such a lushness of vague imagery that it sometimes recalls, in the strangest way, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony. But the essays have no similar weaknesses. Here Woolf is in complete control.
The pleasure of the essays is so great that we might read two dozen of them before it occurs to us how curiously indefinite their conclusions often are, how simple many of their arguments. We are told, perhaps, only that education may be important to the novelist, or that the Russians are great writers; and yet we emerge with a feeling of unusual completeness and certainty. We have been, we feel, through a process; we have been taken through a process in which something has been changed, a process whose very action is humane. In proving her simple propositions Woolf adjourns to a line of reasoning in which, while the appearance of conventional continuity is maintained, the stress is slipped a little off its object. It falls, as she might say, here a little to the left, there a little below, with the result that the mind is made to work with scarcely any perception of effort in an unfamiliar way; some extinguished portion of the mind lights up, and an idea is apprehended in a new and unexpected way. In some of her more idiosyncratic essays, especially the great meditations on reading ("Reading," "On Being Ill," and "Street Haunting") the essentials of the process are exaggerated and hence made fully evident. But the visible development of an essay like "On Being Ill" is invisibly present as a kind of submerged structure beneath her more conventional essays. The emphasis is always on the conditions that affect the operation of the mind.
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