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The Modern English Novel Plus

Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. George H. Doran Company

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. George H. Doran Company

The Dial, May 1921. 572–575

If symbolism was carried off by a collection of Greeks, Jews, Spaniards, Germans, Americans, and Belgians writing French, France is no worse off than England, where letters since the Nineties seem to have been maintained by one Pole, two Americans, and a horde of Irishmen. Germany at least had the vitality left to produce a philosophical historian as late as 1917, but Spengler according to his own testimony is the dying gasp, while all of occidental Europe enters upon the winter of its civilization.

In any case, the Spenglerian doctrine is not endangered any by Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, where we learn in five hundred pages, against a background of afternoon teas and the names of philosophers, that Katharine loves Ralph but is engaged to William who is also chafing under the bondage since he has come to care more for Cassandra, while Ralph has concealed his love from Katharine, and Mary loves Ralph in vain so that in the end she must strive to forget, but Katharine and Ralph are united by her mother—concealing a tear of happiness—and Cassandra and William ditto.

The appearance of Night and Day is all the more astonishing in that it was preceded by The Voyage Out, a first novel in which Mrs. Woolf had made a distinct advance upon the representative modern English novel. The book was marked at times by a peculiar loneliness of vision. Or perhaps better, a readjustment of the angle of approach. This quality is to be found, for instance, in the passage where the ship on which the action of the novel is taking place is suddenly treated as it is seen by the passengers of other vessels, so that it becomes simply “a ship passing in the night.” It is present when the heroine’s first serious moonings are shattered by the rousing appearance of an English battleship, or when the illness which is to cause her death is introduced in this wise:

Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head ached.

It is to be found in the self-serious conversation of two friends while one of them is cutting his toe nails. Or the description of a hotel attained by giving a two-or-three-line glimpse at each separate and unrelated entity. Or the sudden memory of a drizzly day in London when the book has us baking in the steady heat of the Amazon.

In its weakest exemplification, the tendency shows up in the following kind of attack, a method which has been squeezed and sucked dry by our neo-Whitmanites, and which the earnest editors of Contact would probably dispose of very rightly as “modern traditionalism”:

It was as though the room were instantly flooded with water. After a moment’s hesitation, first one couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate bits.

Without this shift of attitude, her material is composed of the characteristic English-novel accessories. Mr. Pepper is a vegetarian pedant who complains of his ailments; St John is the eunuch second-lead friend who worships the heroine awkwardly and always says the wrong thing, for which you love him; Mrs. Somebody is partially deaf, so that tragic news gains a hysterical relief by being shouted at her four times. Indeed, a great many of her characters are stock types which could be patched together from one season on Broadway.

Too often, the general mentality behind the books displays a hankering after the secrets of life, the sacred experience, the beautiful truths which are sensed—not realized in crude clarity—one more bow, in short, to the inarticulate muqueuses. The more important—and therefore sensitive characters—spend a large portion of their time living as in a dream, frequently floating in so disturbingly indefinite a thing as a cloud of thought. Indeed, Mrs. Woolf’s vocabulary for fixing brain states does not depart radically from that of Oliver Optic; we learn, for instance, that her hero’s “mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden snow.” She also accepts with unquestioning seriousness what Benda would call the “aesthetic of love”: which is to say that the Bronte throb is restored with neither additions nor subtractions. (And while on this subject it might be well to add that Mrs. Woolf’s romantic men are more than a vengeance for our male authors’ romantic women.)

These tendencies, however, show to much less disadvantage in The Voyage Out, since in this book the technical manipulation has been so thorough. It is a splendid stroke, for instance, when the heroine is dead, to dismiss her and her lover entirely, return to the hotel and summon a raging storm. For a few pages this little colony of Britishers, who have come all the way to South America and transplanted every single feature of their life in England, chat nervously while the tropical storm rips by and Rachel is known to he dead. It passes; we see it lighting far out on the ocean; the Britishers go to their rooms. One gets the smell of fresh damp vegetation . . . and the death of the heroine has been magnificently orchestrated. In fact, The Voyage Out is full of such careful juxtaposition of elements; Mrs. Woolf reaches the highest points in her book by just this method.

If Night and Day had been followed by The Voyage Out, one could explain very glibly that the first book was a mere blind tentative. But as the books were written in the reverse order, it seems that Mrs. Woolf did not realize her own distinctions. The same calamity happened to Louis Wilkinson, who wrote The Buffoon, and then went scurrying back to the usual society novel of his countrymen. As a matter of fact, the ideal development of a writer would probably be in exactly the opposite direction. Before he had attained a complete consciousness of his intentions and a mediumistic equipment with which to embody those intentions, he would be much nearer the general level of writing than after he had gotten himself really in hand. To take the example of music, it is only in their earlier compositions that Scriabine and Debussy approach the Grade 3 A splendour of the Minute Waltz.

But for some reason or other, literature seems to fight shy of this Zug nach Innen. There is the case of Sherwood Anderson in America, for instance, who is evolving on the principle that the stages of a literary artist should be, first to express one’s self, then to express an Illinois butcher, and finally to express all the readwhile-runners in seven continents. (Those, that is, for whom a book is the moral equivalent of a newspaper or a box of chocolates. The work of art is received as a vague lump; the acme of critical acumen is attained in the characteristic “Have you read the latest book by—?” To become “great,” a book must naturally be composed of elements which do not go beyond this preponderant public.) In America, this process of vulgarization is caused by our neo-Whitmanite hoax, which strives to make art explode like a blunderbuss. In England, perhaps, it all derives from the deadly combination of literature and the drawing room.