Why we should read Part 12

The heroine's mother spent her life in making phrases and adding to the monumental biography of her poet father, while Katherine, the daughter, rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to work at mathematics, a subject that appealed to her solely because it was opposed to literature.

As a foil to Katherine is Mary Datchet, the twenty-five-year-old parson's daughter living alone in London, enjoying Emerson and the darning of stockings, while earning her own living in a suffrage office in Russell Square. The two main male characters are also sharply differentiated.

There is William Rodney, who reads papers on the Elizabethan use of metaphors, irresistibly ludicrous in appearance, with his nervous, impulsive manners and immaculate clothes. "By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition." This man is engaged to Katherine though ten years her senior and "with more of the old maid in him than poet."

Ralph Denham, the other man of importance, is a rough-tongued, poor solicitor with an uncanny power of making people do what he wanted (especially the two girls in the novel), who lived in a very different style from that to which Katherine was accustomed. Here is a delightful description of the Hilbery _menage_:

"They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the s.h.i.+ning brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was always yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever"--from which it appears that Virginia Woolf is one of those writers who, interested in every thing, observe and note every detail in their work. "Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superst.i.tious charm to their performance." Every evening, for instance, we hear of Katherine reading aloud while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, "not so attentively but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine."

Her father spent his days editing his review or "placing together doc.u.ments by means of which it would be proved that Sh.e.l.ley had written 'of' instead of 'and,' or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the 'Nag's Head' and not the 'Turkish Knight,' or that the Christian name of Keats's uncle had been John rather than Richard."

He represents the opposite pole from Ralph Denham, the seemingly hard and self-sufficient young man with the queer temper, consumed with a desire to get on, unpopular both in the office and at home.

One of the charms of the book lies in the setting. We are swept from Lincoln's Inn Fields and Kensington to country rectories and manor houses in Lincolns.h.i.+re where everything is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. It is in this country that the main characters find themselves.

Ralph finds himself in love with Katherine; Katherine finds herself out of love with Rodney, to whom she is engaged, and in love with Ralph; Mary finds herself in love with Ralph; Rodney finds that n.o.body loves him: there are incomprehensible confusions in the minds of all the characters about love: but most of them are honest enough not only to realise their confusions, but to confess them. They begin to doubt their loves when they are in each other's presences, and be certain of them when they are again alone.

It is this finding of themselves that makes them interesting, for they are not, on the whole, lovable characters. One feels sorry for them, yes, and it is probable that Virginia Woolf herself loves them, but we feel that they are all shut away in a world which is far from ours. Over and over again we find ourselves enveloped in a Jane Austenish atmosphere, partly induced, no doubt, by the extreme deliberation of the writer. Virginia Woolf is in no hurry to arrive at any conclusion.

Perhaps it is a virtue in her that we feel that reason will always triumph over the heart in these people. Perhaps it should, but it surely depends on the height of the pa.s.sion to which the heart is capable of rising. In none of these characters is there any very explosive property.

Katherine's attempt to reconcile the world of reality with the dream world is not fairly portrayed, for the simple reason that her dream world is always such a thin one. Ralph Denham embodies for her the lover on the great horse riding by the seash.o.r.e and the leaf-hung forests, but beyond the fact that he paces up and down the streets outside her windows for two nights he gives no indications of the great lover. The truth is that we are never allowed to see at all clearly into Katherine's or Ralph's dream world. Virginia Woolf may have found herself incapable of taking us into its recesses: in the world of reality she is wonderful. It gives the whole of the book away when we find that we are more interested in the purely ineffective characters, like Mrs Hilbery, than in Katherine, who ought to have been a tragic character. "It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process," quotes Katherine to herself, "not the discovery itself at all." When one of Hugh Walpole's heroines begins to say things like that to herself we know that she is going to suffer incredible anguish in the process, but Katherine suffers nothing worse than having to listen to the gossip of an aunt who tells her that her _fiance_ (with whom she is not in love) has been flirting with another girl. Katherine ought to have been a discarded mistress at least. We feel cheated.

But we don't feel cheated when we listen to the author describing trivial people or a beautiful scene. Just as she is able to see and describe whatever emotions and ideas flit through the souls of her characters, so she can see and describe with equal skill and beauty and exactness the country fields of Lincolns.h.i.+re, Kew Gardens, London by night, the river and interiors of houses.

We do feel cheated when Katherine has visions such as the following ...

and nothing comes of them:--

"She was walking down a road in Northumberland in the August sunset; at the inn she left her companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was transported, not so much by her own feet as by some invisible means, to the top of a high hill. Here the scents, the sounds among the dry heather-roots, the gra.s.s-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such thoughts with an extreme ardour, which became a desire to change her actual condition for something matching the conditions of her dream."

Unfortunately there is nothing in Ralph Denham to make him the object of such an ardour, unless his brusque way of trying to bully people of less mental calibre than himself makes him a heroic figure.

"I suppose I'm in love," he says to Mary, who is herself madly in love with him and he knows it. "Anyway, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate her for half-an-hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable."

Whatever he felt he had no right to talk to her of all women like that.

This is no rider from the sea on a great horse, but as ineffectual and contemptible a creature as the pedant, Rodney. He actually sets before him on his table a note from Katherine, a flower he had picked for her, a photograph of a statue of a Greek G.o.ddess which (if the lower part were concealed!) had often given him the ecstasy of being in her presence and then sets himself to visualise her.

No, Ralph Denham is not calculated to inspire our affection, respect or love. It is more pleasant to dwell on the reality of his home than of himself. Katherine visits his mother and finds her sitting at a large dining-room table "untidily strewn with food and unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas," bending over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp.

"The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katherine had seen in one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended b.a.l.l.s and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school texts. Her eye was arrested by cross scabbards of fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and wherever there was a high flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his forequarters."

That is excellent writing and invaluable for the creation of a proper atmosphere.

It is in this sense of atmosphere that Virginia Woolf most clearly shows her great gifts. The broad green s.p.a.ces, the vista of trees, the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance at Kew, the Strand which makes Katherine think in terms of mathematics, and the Embankment which sent her back to her dream forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the magnanimous hero, are delicately but surely made to serve their turn in the unravelling of the story. "Strange thoughts are bred in pa.s.sing through crowded streets should the pa.s.senger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening inattentively to music."

So walking down the Charing Cross Road Katherine wonders if she would mind being run over by a motor-bus or having "an adventure with that disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station," and her mind answers, No. She could not conceive fear or excitement.

So Ralph Denham's mind is filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katherine when in Lincolns.h.i.+re he sees "laid out on the perfectly flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small grey manor house, with ponds, terraces and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm-building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their trunks."

So Mrs Hilbery in her consciousness of the running green lines of the hedges, the swelling ploughland, the mild blue sky finds a pastoral background to the drama of human life.

So Ralph a.s.sociates Mary with the mist of winter hedges and the clear red of the bramble leaves: so Mary with regard to Ralph. "Her thoughts seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in.

Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields she was cold and depressed and horribly clear-sighted."

Mary, by the way, is nearer our conception of a likeable person than anyone else in the book. She has at any rate attained to the standpoint that life is full of complexity and must, in spite or because of that, be loved to the last fibre of it.

And so it is with us: we carry away, after putting _Night and Day_ down for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty s.p.a.ces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.

And so we come to read _Night and Day_ in a mood very different from that which sends us to _Tom Jones_ or _Wuthering Heights_: there is no full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable pa.s.sion. It is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many f.e.c.kless people are portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are interested by their confused states of mind.

We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for the _n_th time.

There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and individuality, and the reader who turns away from _Night and Day_ because the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both emotional and intellectual.

VIII

E. C. BOOTH

There are many people whose taste in fiction is so fastidious that the sight of dialect in a novel makes them refuse to read it. To such people Mr Edward C. Booth makes no appeal. Both in _The Cliff-End_ and _Fondie_ (his two great books) well-nigh every character speaks in a broad Yorks.h.i.+re accent. They are stories of the soil, of people who move in a world very different from that which Mr Stephen M'Kenna has annexed as his own. His novels move in a most leisurely manner, like the people in them: anyone who reads novels for their plots alone may omit Mr Booth's name from his library list. Neither in _The Cliff-End_ nor _Fondie_ does the actual plot matter much. In point of fact, the basic idea in each is rather stupid. Pamela is so sweet a girl that the Spawer would never have hesitated at all in real life; Blanche in reality would never have drowned herself for so little a reason as one illegitimate child.

No: we read _The Cliff-End_ for its s.p.a.ciousness, its freshness, its rippling current of humour, its myriad living characters, its beautiful setting and its picture of love. For it is first and last a rattling good love romance.

You can test your appreciation of Mr Booth by his opening chapters. If the description of Tankard's Bus fails to charm you, don't read on. Such fare is not for you. But there are many of us who can be sufficiently grateful for such a beginning as this:

"Tankard's Bus is the most beautiful bus in the world--the biggest, blandest, n.o.blest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous ... no fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with bal.u.s.trades of real bra.s.s. Five steps form the complement of a full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig--as many, indeed, as take most of us up to bed ... only to take one sacramental sniff of its cus.h.i.+ons is to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy of the district; is to divine the soul of the soil, the heart of the heavy-headed corn, a-flush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of the barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips; the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence of the reaper; the busy hum of the thres.h.i.+ng-machine, in indefatigable ascent and descent of its three semitones ... it is timed to leave the Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat you would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest...." All the way through the first chapter we watch this 'bus filling and emptying like a bee-hive, threading its way at last out of Hunmouth, away into the country-side ... "and so on and so on and so on, along the dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light."

Not only has Mr Booth observed accurately and with the eye of an artist this corner of East Yorks.h.i.+re scenery, but he has made himself complete master of the vernacular.

""Ev ye 'eard 'ow Mester Jenkison' mother' sister-in-law's gettin' on, Steg?'

"'Ay,' says Steg.

""Ow is she then?'

"'She's deead.'

"'Nay! Is she an' all? Poor owd woman!'

"'She is that!' says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work, as though he had the credit of her demise. 'She deed ti morn at aif-past six.'

"'An' when's t' buryin'? Did y'ear?'

"'Ay, they telt me,' says Steg.

"'It'll be o' Thosday, Ah's think.'

"'Nay, bud it weean't. Wensday. There's ower much thunder about for keepin'.'"