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Cultural Critique. Introduced and Edited by
Brenda R. Silver

On November 18, 1940, in the midst of the bombing that had already destroyed both her houses in London, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary a response to her male contemporaries spurred by her reading of Herbert Read's autobiography:

Little boys making sand castles. This refers to H[erbert] Read; Tom Eliot; Santayana; Wells. Each is weathertight, & gives shelter to the occupant. . . . But I am the sea which demolishes these castles. I use this image; meaning that owing to Read's article on Roger, his self that built the castle is to me destructive of its architecture. A mean, spiteful Read dwells outside. What is the value of a philosophy which has no power over life? I have the double vision. I mean, as I am not engrossed in the labour of making this intricate word structure I also see the man who makes it. I should say it is only word proof not weather proof. . . . His selection from literature is: Flaubert, Henry James, Blake, Wordsworth. All we at the moment can do is to make these selections: like dogs seeking the grass that cures us. But of course, being a tower dweller, Read then walls them in, others out. ... I am carrying on, while I read, the idea of women discovering, like the 19th century rationalists, agnostics, that man is no longer God. My position, ceasing to accept the religion, is quite unlike Read's, Wells', Tom's, or Santayana's. It is essential to remain Page 647 →outside; & realise my own beliefs: or rather not to accept theirs. A line to think out. (Diary 5:340).1

Five days later, Woolf noted that having just finished the novel she later entitled Between the Acts, her "thoughts turn, well up, to write the first chapter of the next book (nameless). Anon, it will be called" (Diary 5:340). The reference here to "Anon," the opening essay in the "Common History" of English literature that Woolf was writing at the time of her death, provides an apt juxtaposition to the previous entry.2 Taken together, the two entries illustrate Woolf's emphasis at the end of her life on the project that had occupied her throughout: the construction of a cultural narrative that would deconstruct the history and the "traditions" that have empowered men to act like gods whose pursuit of their religions and beliefs threatened the very future of civilization itself. In Woolf's narrative, women, who have historically been outsiders and agnostics in relation to the institutions and beliefs that constitute the official version of culture, can write culture anew.

The most visible manifestations of Woolf's ongoing critique of her culture appear in her two major works of feminist polemic. A Room of One's Own (1929) provides an innovative history of women's creativity and literary tradition that serves as a corrective to T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; and Three Guineas (1938) answers the question of how women can help to end war, by brilliantly dissecting the destructiveness inherent in patriarchal culture and its institutions. But her cultural critique began much earlier and permeated every aspect of her consciousness and her writing, fictional, critical, polemical alike, linking her exposure of the traditions that have imprisoned her male colleagues in their deadly word structures to her creation of a counterculture, a counterhistory, and a countertradition, associated with women and artists.3

The texts that appear below provide glimpses from the beginning, the middle, and the end of Woolf's career into the historical inscriptions of gender that characterize her revisionary project. The first section of "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn," a story written in 1906 when Woolf was twenty-four, sets out an agenda for rewriting history by including the details of daily life, in particular those of domestic life, which means writing the excluded history of women.4 The selections from "Byron and Mr. Briggs" (1922), written in conjunction with Woolf's first book of criticism, The Common Reader, provide a genealogy and characteristics for her central figure of cultural authority, the "common reader."5 In it, she represents Mr. Briggs and his descendants as lively participants in a dialogue that they create and continue through the acts of reading and talk. By 1940-1941, when Woolf was making her "Notes for Reading at Random" and writing "Anon" and "The Reader," the role of the reader in the creation of any kind of cultural story had become more problematic—and more urgent. Her "Common History," written under pressure of her own and her culture's death, not only articulates a cultural history rooted in the (unconscious) emotions and desires that generate creation and Page 648 →destruction but also posits a tradition that sets the creative instinct against the powers of barbarism and death so dominant at that time.6 Within this tradition, both Anon—who is sometimes man, sometimes woman, but always outsider and critic—and the reader become metaphors for the potentially regenerative role of the artist and art.

For Woolf, as for her contemporaries who lived through World War I and the unfolding political and cultural crises of the interwar period, the question of tradition and cultural values had more than academic resonance. Recording a conversation in 1935 about religion, morality, communism, and writing with Eliot, J. M. Keynes, and her nephew Julian Bell, Woolf accuses the younger generation of having "no sense of tradition and continuity. I used to feel that the British Museum reading room was going on for ever" (Diary 4:208). "Tom," she adds, "agreed to most of this, but reserved his idea of God." This reservation is crucial, for the conversation was initiated by Eliot's publication of After Strange Gods, the work in which he calls most forcefully for a return to a "tradition" grounded in shared but exclusive religious and cultural beliefs ("right tradition") and the practice of "orthodoxy." As John Guillory has pointed out, what started in Eliot as a "violent revisionist impulse" in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" had been transformed by 1934 into "orthodoxy and the literary elite" (176, 184-185). It is here that Woolf differs most strongly from Eliot, as well as Pound and Yeats, all of whom turned, as she herself did during the thirties, to social and political commentary. Unlike these men, she does not locate the origins of the threat to civilization in the loss of Christianity or other forms of systemic belief. Instead she turns a critical eye on the discourses and the impact of a patriarchal culture dedicated to hierarchy, dominance, capitalism, imperialism, and war. The result is her rejection of the orthodoxies and authorities, including those associated with fascism, that so many of her male contemporaries came to accept and even to glorify as the solution to their culture's ills.

What distinguishes Woolf's perspective on tradition and cultural values from these men's is a divided consciousness, or double vision, that is inseparable from her consciousness of herself as a woman and her distrust of priestly male authority. On the one hand, Woolf shared with her male colleagues a sense of her cultural inheritance, the European literary and cultural tradition, that she had access to through her family—in particular her father, Leslie Stephen—and her social class, as well as through the act of reading.7 On the other hand, Woolf was from the beginning acutely aware of the limited role that women had played—and continued to play—whether as artists and critics, in the creation and transmission of the tradition defined by men. She recognized early both women's marginality and exclusion. Even the British Museum reading room, Woolf's recurring image of the archives of traditional culture, made the message clear; Julia Hedge, struggling to write an essay of her own, stares at the names ringing the dome and asks, "why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?" (Jacob's Room 106). In a diary entry written when Woolf was twenty-one, the aspiring writer and critic vividly Page 649 →expresses the dual sense of inheritance and exclusion that constituted women's relationship to their culture. Reading in the country, she muses, "I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together—how any live mind today is ... of the very same stuff as Plato's and Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing—It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind. ... I feel as though I had grasped the central meaning of the world, & all these poets & historians & philosophers were only following out paths branching from that centre in which I stand." In the city, however, "I read—then I lay down the book—& say—what right have I, a woman, to read all these things that men have done? They would laugh if they saw me."8

Twenty-five years later this split consciousness had become for Woolf the source of both women's criticism and their vision. A passage in A Room of One's Own that has rightly become an icon of contemporary feminist thought describes how "if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical" (101). For Woolf, the woman who is turned away from the libraries and chased off the turf at her culture's major universities experiences from within the alienation, or exile, that Edward Said associates with the ability to write a critical narrative of one's culture. Unlike Erich Auerbach, Said's example, whose exile to Turkey enabled him to escape the "authoritative and authorizing agencies" that would have prevented his audacious task of chronicling the whole of the Western cultural tradition, women experience this "critically important alienation" (8) while standing at its political and ideological centers: Whitehall, for example. If culture is equated with place, with “belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place" a form of possession, and the critic has to be "out of place," displaced, or homeless to acquire a critical consciousness (8), then women, denied a place in its public discourses, are among its most discerning critics. Forced into self-awareness and the isolated consciousness that comes from being divided—"out of place but very much of that place"—they have the potential to stand "consciously against the prevailing orthodoxy and very much for a professedly universal or humane set of values" (Said 15). In Woolf's perception, expressed most forcefully in Three Guineas, women not only can but must exploit the contradictions engendered by their liminality to reveal the partiality of the reigning truths. However "unpleasant it is to be locked out," she (under)states, "it is worse perhaps to be locked in" (A Room 24).

In exploring Woolf's inscription of this prophetic insight, I want to focus on her dialogue with Eliot about the location of cultural authority and its construction as a priesthood. I use here Said's analysis of the critic's cultural function and position, his plea for a "secular criticism," which focuses on the modernists and the shift in cultural authority they effected in the beginning of the twentieth century from filiation to affiliation. Rejecting the cultural inheritance handed down to them by their parents (filiation), writers and intellectuais Page 650 →turned instead to the production of alternate systems of relationship, alternate systems of cultural values and belief, that claimed their authority through "institutions, associations, and communities" founded on affiliation (Said 17). But in reauthorizing themselves through these affilations, the modernists reinstituted or reaffirmed a concept of authority that brought with it its own hierarchies, canons, and exclusiveness. One might say, as Eliot did when he chose to call his iconoclastic critical work The Sacred Wood—an allusion to the sacred grove where "the priesthood is secured only by murdering the previous encumbent" (Baldick 112)—"the priest is dead; long live the priest."

While Said assumes the participation of women in the modernist shift from filiation to affiliation, he offers no women as examples. But if gender is absent from his critique of this process of shifting authorities, it was only too present to Woolf. However much she agreed with Eliot that "tradition and continuity" were important, she reacted strongly and negatively to the continuing religious cast of his cultural authority and cultural critique, which she associated with patriarchal values and constraints. If Matthew Arnold perceived culture as the new religion and located it in the state and Eliot reclaimed the authority of religion itself for the new clergy, the literary and cultural critics (Guillory 184-185), Woolf wanted to reject the priestly, the religious model, wherever it appeared. In Jacob's Room, for example (as Christine Froula has illustrated), she juxtaposes the respectful male response to the authority of a university don to that of "a woman" who, "divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise" (Jacob’s Room 41; Froula 321-323).9 In Three Guineas, she responds to her male colleague's request that she join a society pledged to "protect culture and intellectual liberty" with an analysis of how women's experience of these "abstract words" (88) has made her wary of all organized institutions and societies with their credo "shall not, shall not, shall not" (105). Instead, she calls upon women to remain a society of outsiders, preserving their duality of perspective—their critical difference—and using it to envision something new. In Woolf's Outsiders Society there will be no officers, no hierarchies, no authorities, no ceremonies or oaths—only the common goal women share with their brothers, to prevent dictatorship and war (105-106).

One other aspect of the shift from filiative to affiliative authority proved problematic for Woolf, as for other female modernists: the fact that they brought to their analysis of culture a mixed genealogy and had to come to terms not only with the tradition of the fathers but also with the tradition of the mothers that was just beginning to emerge.10 However much Woolf may have struggled with her literary mothers, however ambiguous she may have been about their art, she was clear that to create a counterculture that could provide alternate values and beliefs to those still espoused by the cultural priests of her day, she had to recover the history of women and their creativity.

History is the key word in Woolf's revisionary project: "we cannot," she declared, "understand the present if we isolate it from the past" (Pargiters 8). Page 651 →Here, as in her insistence in A Room of One's Own that literature is "attached to life at all four corners ... to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in" (43-44), she adopts the teachings of her father, often called the first sociological critic in England, to her own ends. Arguing that writers had to be placed in their social and political contexts, Stephen insists that texts such as letters, diaries, and state papers were as crucial to understanding literary and cultural history as fiction and poetry.11 Where Woolf differs is in transforming these writings, considered even by Stephen to be of secondary importance, into primary inscriptions of women's creativity.

"The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn," Woolf's early attempt to write women into culture, establishes many of her recurring themes. In the first section, which I have included below, the medieval historian Rosamond Merridew describes her method and her quarrels with her male colleagues and illustrates her point about the importance of domestic life by recounting her discovery of Joan Martyn's diary. Offered either the household accounts or the stud book by the present male owner of the manor house in Norfolk that had been Joan's home, the historian chooses instead to recuperate the diary of the young woman. This act of recuperation illustrates her methodological premise that reconstructions of daily life, even when an act of imagination is needed to make them, are more than digressions; they recreate the "reality" of the human beings of the period, which is only suggested by the documentary records that all too often omit women.

The diary itself (not reprinted here), which constitutes the second part of the story, records the activities and the thoughts of the women, children, and servants left at home while the father is off in London and the older brothers off at war. The war, at the center of traditional histories and a fact of life for the Martyns, becomes here context, not text. The family priest is present, but more as a companion than a law giver. What emerges are portraits of women who run the estate during the day and read or listen to stories at night. John Lydgate's Palace of Glass sets Joan and her mother dreaming of knights and ladies; an itinerant minstrel provides songs for both the gentry and the peasants who gather in the yard to listen to him; and Joan herself, in her last entry, contemplates writing about knights and ladies adventuring in strange lands but sets more store by another form of art: the storytelling of old women that surpasses what is written in books and that serves as a source of community and continuity:

Such a woman was Dame Elsbeth Aske, who, when she grew too old to knit or stitch & too stiff to leave her chair, sat with clasped hands by the fire all day long, & you had only to pull her sleeve & her eyes grew bright, & she would tell you stories of fights & kings, & great nobles, & stories of the poor people too, till the air seemed to move & murmur. She could sing ballads also; which she made as she sat there. And men & women, old & young, came long distances to hear her; for all that she could neither write nor read. And they thought that she could tell the future too. (267)

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Significantly, while both Joan and her father show great pride in the daughter's literacy—her ability to provide a written record for their descendants—the diarist acknowledges and even privileges an oral tradition associated with women. Equally significant, the figures who receive and transmit the cultural heritage are decidedly not authorities. It is not surprising, then, that when Woolf began to prepare her first book of critical essays in 1918, she read the major critics past and present, and acknowledged the scholar, but chose as her model the "common reader."12 "Byron and Mr. Briggs," conceived as the introductory essay to her projected critical work, illustrates her persistent desire to link literature both to its current readers and to the audience for whom it was produced.

A word needs to be said about Woolf's usage of common here. Woolf is clear in "Byron and Mr. Briggs" that her common reader has a certain amount of education as well as access to a good library and contemporary publications. (The "very exceptional bank clerk" she admits to the company might well be a reference to Eliot.) In this sense common refers to what is shared by a certain class of individuals, not by the culture as a whole. She is also clear that while gender infuses the responses of men and women to the books they read—the reader-narrator admits that notice of the love interest in Byron's letters, not to mention the sentences, reveals her sex—it does not prohibit a reader's access to the books themselves or deserve particular note. (She does not in this essay address the question of the woman writer.) Finally, while her use of common might suggest what readers should share in common, i.e., universally, I would not, as Marianne DeKoven does, associate it with The Book of Common Prayer; this resonates more with Eliot's identification of common with an institutionalized belief than with Woolf's call for independent judgment and thought.13 In fact, Woolf's representation of the iconoclastic role of the common reader presents a sharp contrast to the construction of the critic as priest already implicit in Eliot's Sacred Wood. What distinguishes old Mr. Briggs and his spiritual sons and daughters is exactly their disregard for the priestly function of critics such as Coleridge and Eliot.

By the time Woolf began to write "Anon" and "The Reader" in 1940, the critical consciousness attributed to the common reader had taken on ideological resonance. Whereas Eliot, appealing deliberately to the "uncommon reader," had declared himself as early as 1928 a classicist, a conservative, and an Anglo-Catholic (For Lancelot Andrewes ix), Woolf began to claim more and more forcefully her status as outsider, agnostic, and critic, and to search for a tradition grounded in the heterodox and the inclusive. As is clear from her diary and her letters, Woolf saw the preparation and the writing of her history as a way to counter the destruction occurring all around her. What she searches for, what she claims as common, is not the tradition associated with established institutions or authorities, but what she calls the "song making instinct" and identifies both with the desire to sing and the desire to listen. At the heart of this tradition lies a literature that enacts the mutual strivings of artist and audience rather than the word structures of the solipsistic male Page 653 →voice. "This is continuity," she adds in her "Notes" for "Anon," "certain emotions always in being: felt by people always." "Only when we put two and two together," she declares, "two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks ... do we overcome dissolution and set up some stake against oblivion" ("Anon").

One way to understand Woolf's emphatic rejection of Eliot's vision is through her choice of Hugh Latimore, the sixteenth-century Protestant preacher and martyr, as one of the carriers of the cultural tradition she privileges in her text. Eliot had also evoked Latimore in an early declaration of his creed—his essay on "Lancelot Andrewes" (1926)—but only to dismiss him. In Eliot's depiction, Andrewes, bishop of Winchester under James I, is credited with establishing the intellectual authority of the English church. "Compare a sermon by Andrewes," Eliot writes, "with a sermon by another earlier master, Latimer. It is not merely that Andrewes knew Greek, or that Latimer was addressing a far less cultivated public, or that the sermons of Andrewes are peppered with allusion and quotation. It is rather that Latimer ... is merely a Protestant; but the voice of Andrewes is the voice of a man who has a formed visible Church behind him, who speaks with the old authority and the new culture" (For Lancelot Andrewes 18). For Edward Said, to whom this passage signifies Eliot's own claim to "the old authority and new culture," the "merely" is crucial; it denotes Eliot's rejection of the position and the language of "a protesting orphan" and places him, with Andrewes, squarely within the corporate structure of the new Church (18). Woolf, siding with the mere protestor, grants Latimer the critical consciousness essential to the destruction of the castles and towers that wall people in.

In Woolf's portrayal, Latimer speaks with the voice of the outsider and critic; he preaches by the roadside to the common people, uses the common English tongue, and criticizes the established authorities, including the king. "He is public crier," she comments in her reading notes, "also journalist: a kind of representative of the people—licensed to speak out against abuses—a weekly article in a left paper" ("A & R" 410). He belongs squarely in the line of singers and performers who constitute the tradition and the relationship to authority that she associates with Anon. In fact, it is Anon's social isolation and position as outcast that grant him or her the freedom to "say out loud what we feel, but are too proud to admit" ("Anon"); similarly, Anon's ability to tap the reservoir of common feeling and common belief results in tolerance, if not acceptance, by the otherwise divergent social classes who constitute his or her audience. Most important, perhaps, Anon's use, like Latimer's, of the common idiom, English, in contrast to the learned, or aristocratic, tongues— French, Greek, and Latin—speaks eloquently to Woolf's desire to establish the mother tongue as the medium for an alternate cultural discourse.14

While most of the producers and transmitters of the common voice named in the essay are men, "Anon" and the various fragments of "The Reader" also chronicle the various ways that women have contributed to the creation of a counterculture. A cryptic comment in her "Notes," "Semiramis— Page 654 →more on Aspasia—witches and fairies," not only suggests her recurring emphasis on the pressures affecting women of genius but also points to their achievements. The juxtaposition of Semiramis and Aspasia, two women traditionally associated with intellectual and artistic accomplishment, with witches recalls her statement in A Room of One's Own that "when . . . one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, . . . then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . . Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman" (50-51).15 For Woolf, she was also a playwright, Miss La Trobe, the central artist figure in Between the Acts, the novel about history, community, continuity, and the role of the artist that Woolf was revising when she began her new critical book. Read in conjunction with the novel, Anon provides a historical ancestry for Miss La Trobe, who is often referred to as "Miss Whatshemame" and whose gift for "getting things up"—for bringing out people's talents and for making individuals aware, however momentarily, of the emotions hidden beneath their public faces and roles—earns her acceptance in the community that otherwise scorns and ostracizes her. But even when not artists, women play a crucial role in Woolf's historical narrative as letter writers, as diarists, and, most important, as readers (just as they appear in Between the Acts as the playwright's most responsive audience and as voracious, creative readers). When Woolf wanted a figure to embody the birth of the reader, she turned almost instinctively to Lady Anne Clifford.16

Ultimately, the presence of an audience responsive to the ancestral memories evoked by Anon emerges as the primary focus of Woolf's speculative history. The traditional works written by university-trained "insiders" might "do a great service like Roman roads," but her "Common History" would pursue what they avoid: "the forests & the will o the wisps" (Diary 5: 333). "Try to write lit the other way round," she comments in her "Notes"; "define the influences: the affect; the growth; the surrounding, also the inner cunent." If one aim was to chart the growth of human consciousness and the desires that lie buried in the human psyche, another was to highlight the material conditions and the social and cultural discourses surrounding the production and reception of art. "Keep a running commentary upon the External," she enjoins herself ("Notes"); for the desire to sing, located at the origins of creation, depends upon the building of the hut, the preservation of the body and social interaction, for it to find a human voice.

By the end of March 1941 the external had become too pressing for Woolf. If her drafts for "The Reader," which are among the last things she wrote, assert that readers are still in existence, they also convey the devastating results of the reader's present absence or silence: "when his attention is distracted, in times of public crisis, the writer exclaims: I can write no more."17 The powers of greed, evil, violence, and destruction, present even in the world of Anon, had become too strong. Although women, readers, and artists populate Woolf's revisionary cultural narratives and provide an alternate Page 655 →cultural script, the circumstances in 1941 prevented them, in Woolf's perspective, from translating their individual consciousness into action or art. ("Skip present day; A Chapter on the future": "Notes.") Like Robert Burton, author of Anatomy of Melancholy, she sat in her room thinking of suicide. But despite her despair, the interconnected images of author, reader, and text that dominate her history and inform even her final musings offer us, her descendants, a vision of inconclusiveness and liminality as powerful strategies for cultural criticism and change.

NOTES

  1. 1. Read had reviewed Woolf's biography of Roger Fry in the Spectator, August 2, 1940. For another analysis of art and exclusion see Woolf, "The Leaning Tower" (1940). I wish to thank Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, administrators of the Author's Literary Estate, for their generous permission to reprint the extracts from Woolf's writings that appear in this chapter. In addition, I wish to acknowledge Twentieth Century Literature for permission to reprint "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn" and sections of " 'Anon' and 'The Reader': Virginia Woolf's Last Essays"; and Yale Review for permission to reprint extracts from "Byron and Mr. Briggs."
  2. 2. Woolf "conceived" her "idea for a Common History book—to read from one end of lit. including biog; & range at will, consecutively" on September 12, 1940 (Diary 5:318). On September 18, she wrote "Reading at Random/Notes" at the top of a notebook, in which she recorded a number of ideas for structuring a work she called, tentatively, Reading at Random or Turning the Page. At the time of her death, she had written a more or less complete version of the first essay, "Anon," and several fragments of the opening of the second essay, "The Reader." The working notes, entitled "Notes for Reading at Random" (and cited here as "Notes"), as well as her reading notes and the drafts for the essays are now housed in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, and the Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library. A fuller edition of "Notes for Reading at Random," "Anon," and "The Reader" appear in Silver, " 'Anon' and 'The Reader': Virginia Woolf's Last Essays" (cited as "A & R").
  3. 3. In Gordon's biography of Woolf, "counter-history" is associated with "homemakers and artists—the creators of civilization" (161 ff). See also Johnston.
  4. 4. I am using the transcription of the story by Susan M. Squier and Louise A. DeSalvo that appears in Twentieth Century Literature. See also Susan Dick's edition.
  5. 5. I am using the clean copy version of the essay by Edward A. Hungerford that appeared in the Yale Review. See also Andrew McNeillie's fuller transcription.
  6. 6. Late in her life Woolf also started reading Freud, whose Civilization and Its Discontents may well be echoed here; see Diary 5:250. For a discussion of Freud's influence on the darkness of Woolf's later vision, see Elizabeth Abel.
  7. 7. See, for example, her essay " 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia,' " where she adds her name and her perceptions to "the long succession of readers" extending back to 1655 before sending the book into the future (CE 1:19).
  8. 8. [Diary] No. 2. Berg Collection. Cited in Silver, Reading Notebooks 5-6.
  9. 9. Froula also notes that access to priestly or cultural authority is related to power, not sex, and that within this paradigm what defines "men" and "women" is their relation :o and attitude toward cultural authority (322-323).
  10. 10. See, for example, Gilbert and Gubar's study of the "female affiliation complex."
  11. Page 656 →11. While this belief is expressed in many of Stephen's writings, his lecture to schoolboys, "The Study of English Literature," provides a good source of comparison to Woolf's practice.
  12. 12. Woolf began to read criticism and critical theory for the book she originally called Reading or Reading and Writing at the end of 1918 and continued to read until the work was published as The Common Reader in 1925. For references and sources, see Silver, Reading Notebooks.
  13. 13. In addition to analyzing the use of common, DeKoven argues convincingly that the book itself is a "reader" and illustrates how Woolf undermines the authority of Dr. Johnson's pronouncement on the common reader by making her reader judge works by their representation of women.
  14. 14. It is worth noting in this respect that Andrewes was a principle translator of the Authorized Version of the Bible. In "Anon," Woolf identifies the lack of a useful, intimate common prose or speech with the influence of the biblical style.
  15. 15. Semiramis, patterned on a ninth-century Assyrian queen, was associated during the Hellenistic period with various works of law, literature, and architecture. Aspasia, a hetaira, or courtesan, in fifth-century Athens, was the highly educated companion of Pericles who later owned her own house of women; Plato credited her with writing Pericles' famous funeral oration (Menexenus). In A Room of One's Own Woolf cites Pericles' comment that "the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of" in her discussion of how "anonymity runs in [women's] blood" (52).
  16. 16. Previously, Lady Anne Clifford and her diary had provided Woolf with details of Elizabethan material life and the education given to noblewomen in the sixteenth century that enabled them to be patrons but not poets; see "The Elizabethan Lumber Room" (1925) and "Donne after Three Centuries" (1932). In "Anon" and "The Reader" she emerges as a figure in her own right.
  17. 17. Gordon (259-262) reads "Anon" and "The Reader" as a study of the failure of the contemporary audience to be the kind of common reader that Woolf felt was necessary for creative interaction with the artist. Patricia Joplin explores the other side: the ability of artists, including Miss La Trobe, to incite violence, as in Nazi Germany.

WORKS CITED

  • This list includes works cited in the selections below.
  • Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989.
  • Bacon, Francis. Essays and Colours of Good and Evil. Ed. W. Aldis Wright. London: Macmillan, 1862.
  • ———. The Letters and Life. Ed. James A. Spedding. Vol. 1, "Lady Bacon at Gorhambury."
  • Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
  • Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903.
  • Chambers, E. K., and F. Sidgwick. Early English Lyrics. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926.
  • Clifford, Lady Anne. Diary. Ed. V. Sackville-West. London: Heinemann, 1923.
  • DeKoven, Marianne. "Virginia Woolf as Critic in The Common Reader." Presented to the Modem Language Association, 1987.
  • Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934.
  • ———. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928.
  • Evans, B. Ifor. A Short History of English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940.
  • Froula, Christine. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy." Critical Inquiry 10(1983):321-347.
  • Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. " 'Forward into the Past': The Female Affiliation Complex." No Man's Land, vol. 1, 165-226. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.
  • Page 657 →Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. New York: Norton, 1984.
  • Guillory, John. "The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks." Critical Inquiry 10(1983):173-198.
  • Harrison, G. B. An Elizabethan Journal: 1591-1594. London: Constable, 1928.
  • ———. Elizabethan Plays and Players. London: Routledge, 1940.
  • Harrison, William. Harrison's Description of England in Shakspere's Youth. Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall. 2 vols. London: New Shakspeare Society, 1877.
  • Henslowe, Philip. Diary. Ed. Walter W. Greg. 2 vols. London: Bullen, 1904-1908.
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The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn

My readers may not know, perhaps, who I am. Therefore, although such a practise is unusual & unnatural—for we know how modest writers are—I will not hesitate to explain that I am Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged fortyfive—my frankness is consistent!—& that I have won considerable fame among my profession for the researches I have made into the system of land tenure in mediaeval England. Berlin has heard my name; Frankfurt would give a soireé in my honour; & I am not absolutely unknown in one or two secluded rooms in Oxford & in Cambridge. Perhaps I shall put my case more cogently, human nature being what it is, if I state that I have exchanged a husband & a family & a house in which I may grow old for certain fragments of yellow parchment; which only a few people can read & still fewer would care to read if they could. But as a mother, so I read sometimes not without curiosity in the literature of my sex, cherishes most the ugliest & stupidest of her offspring; so a kind of maternal passion has sprung up in my breast for these shrivelled & colourless little gnomes; in real life I see them as cripples with fretful faces, but all the same, with the fire of genius in their eyes. I will not expound that sentence; it would be no more likely to succeed than if that same mother to whom I compare myself took pains to explain that her cripple was really a beautiful boy, more fair than all his brothers. At any rate, my investigations have made a travelling pedlar of me; save that it is my habit to buy & not to sell. I present myself at old farm houses, decayed halls, parsonages, church vestries always with the same demand. Have you any old papers to show me? As you may imagine the palmy days for this kind of sport are over; age has become the most merchantable of qualities; & the state moreover with its Commissions has put an end for the most part to the enterprise of individuals. Some official, I am often told, has promised to come down & inspect their documents; & the favour of the "State" which such a promise carries with it, robs my poor private voice of all its persuasion.

Still it is not for me to complain, looking back as I can look back, upon some very fine prizes that will have been of real interest to the historian, & upon Page 659 →others that because they are so fitful & so minute in their illumination please me even better. A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne; She wanted stockings! & no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of mediaeval legs; & therefore with the reality of mediaeval bodies, & so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of mediaeval brains; & there you stand at the centre of all ages: middle beginning or end. And this brings me to a further confession of my own virtues. My researches into the system of land tenure in the 13th 14th & 15th Centuries have been made doubly valuable, I am assured, by the remarkable gift I have for presenting them in relation to the life of the time. I have borne in mind that the intricacies of land tenure were not always the most important facts in the lives of men & Women & children; I have often made so bold as to hint that the subtleties which delight us so keenly were more a proof of our ancestors negligence than a proof of their astonishing painstaking. For what sane man, I have had the audacity to remark, could have spent his time in complicating his laws for the benefit of half a dozen antiquaries who were to be bom five centuries after he was in the grave?

We will not here discuss this argument on whose behalf I have given & taken many shrewd blows; I introduce the question merely to explain why it is that I have made all these enquiries subsidiary to certain pictures of the family life which I have introduced into my text; as the flower of all these intricate roots; the flash of all this scraping of flint.

If you read my work called "The Manor Rolls" you will be pleased or disgusted according to your temperament by certain digressions which you will find there.

I have not scrupled to devote several pages of large print to an attempt to show, vivdly as in a picture, some scene from the life of the time; here I knock at the serfs door, & find him roasting rabbits he has poached; I show you the Lord of the Manor setting out on some journey, or calling his dogs to him for a walk in the fields, or sitting in the high backed chair inscribing laborious figures upon a glossy sheet of parchment. In another room I show you Dame Elinor, at work with her needle; & by her on a lower stool sits her daughter, stitching too, but less assiduously. "Child, thy husband will be here before thy house linen is ready" reproves the mother.

Ah, but to read this at large you must study my book! The critics have always threatened me with two rods; first, they say, such digressions are all very well in a history of the time, but they have nothing to do with the system [of] mediaeval land tenure; secondly, they complain that I have no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance of the truth. It is well known that the period I have chosen is more bare than any other of private records: unless you choose to draw all your inspiration from the Paston Letters you must be content to imagine merely, like any story teller. And that, I am told, is a useful art in its place; but it should be allowed to claim no relationship with the sterner art of the Historian. But here, again, I verge upon that famous argument which I carried on once with so much zeal in the Historians Quarterly; We must make Page 660 →way with our introduction, or some wilful reader may throw down the book & profess to have mastered its contents already: O the old story! Antiquaries Quarrels! Let me draw a line here then so ________ & put the whole of this question of right & wrong, truth & fiction behind me.

On a June morning two years ago, it chanced that I was driving along the Thetford road from Norwich to East Harling. I had been on some expedition, a wild goose chase it was, to recover some documents which I believed to lie buried in the ruins of Caister Abbey. If we were to spend a tithe of the sums that we spend yearly upon excavating Greek cities in excavating our own ruins what a different tale the Historian would have to tell!

Such was the theme of my meditations; but nevertheless one eye, my archaeological eye, kept itself awake to this landscape through which we passed. And it was in obedience to a telegram from this that I leapt up in the carriage, at a certain point & directed the driver to turn sharply to the left. We passed down a regular avenue of ancient elm trees; but the bait which drew me was a little square picture, framed delicately between green boughs at the far end, in which an ancient doorway was drawn distinctly in lines of carved white stone.

As we approached the doorway proved to be encircled by low walls of buff coloured plaster; & on top of them, at no great distance was the roof of ruddy tiles, & finally I beheld in front of me the whole of the dignified little house, built like the letter E with the middle notch smoothed out of it.

Here was one of those humble little old Halls, then, which survive almost untouched, & practically unknown for centuries & centuries, because they are too insignificant to be pulled down or rebuilt; & their owners are too poor to be ambitious. And the descendants of the builder go on living here, with the curious unconsciousness that the house is in any way remarkable which serves to make them as much a part of it, as the tall chimney which has grown black with generations of kitchen smoke. Of course a larger house might be preferable, & I doubt not that they would hesitate to sell this old one, if they had a good offer. But that is the natural, & unselfconscious spirit which proves somehow how genuine the whole thing is. You can not be sentimental about a house you have lived in for 500 years. This is the kind of place, I thought, as I stood with my hand on the bell, where the owners are likely to possess exquisite manuscripts, & sell them as easily [to] the first rag man who comes along, as they would sell their pig wash, or the timber from the park. My point of view is that of a morbid eccentric, after all, & these are the people of healthy nature. Cant they write? they will tell me; & what is the worth of old letters? I always burn mine—or use them to tie over jampots.

A maid came, at last, staring meditatively at me, as though she ought to have remembered my face & my business. "Who lives here?" I asked her, "Mr Martyn" she gaped, as if I had asked the name of the reigning King of England. "Is there a Mrs Martyn, & is she at home, & might I see her?" The girl waved to me to follow, & led me in silence to a person who could, presumably, undertake the responsibility of answering my strange questions.

I was shown across a large hall, panelled with oak, to a smaller room in Page 661 →which a rosy woman of my own age was using a machine upon a pair of trousers. She looked like a housekeeper; but she was, the maid whispered, Mrs Martyn.

She rose with a gesture that indicated that she was not precisely a lady to receive morning calls, but was nevertheless the person of authority, the mistress of the house; who had a right to know my business in coming there.

There are certain rules in the game of antiquary, of which the first & simplest is that you must not state your object at the first encounter. "I was passing by your door; & I took the liberty—I must tell you I am a great lover of the picturesque, to call, on the chance that 1 might be allowed to look over the house. It seems to me a particularly fine specimen."

"Do you want to rent it, may I ask" said Mrs Martyn, who spoke with a pleasant tinge of dialect.

"Do you let rooms then?" I questioned.

"O no," rejoined Mrs Martyn decisively: "We never let rooms; I thought perhaps you wished to rent the whole house."

"It's a little big for me; but still, I have friends."

"Ah well, then," broke in Mrs Martyn, cheerfully, setting aside the notion of profit, & looking merely to do a charitable act; "I'm sure I should be very pleased to show you over the house—I dont know much about old things myself; & I never heard as the house was particular in any way. Still its a pleasant kind of place—if you come from London." She looked curiously at my dress & figure, which I confess felt more than usually bent beneath her fresh, & somewhat compassionate gaze; & I gave her the information she wanted. Indeed as we strolled through the long passages, pleasantly striped with bars of oak across the white wash, & looked into spotless little rooms with square green windows opening on the garden,—& I saw that the furniture was spare but decent, we exchanged a considerable number of questions & answers. Her husband was a farmer on rather a large scale; but land had sunk terribly in value; & they were forced to live in the Hall now, which would not let; although it was far too large for them, & the rats were a nuisance. The Hall had been in her husbands family for many a year, she remarked with some slight pride; she did not know how long, but people said the Martyns had once been great people in the neighbourhood. She drew my attention to the y. in their name. Still she spoke with the very chastened & clear sighted pride of one who knows by hard personal experience how little nobility of birth avails, against certain material drawbacks, the poverty of the land, for instance, the holes in the roof, & the rapacity of rats.

Now although the place was scrupulously clean, & well kept there was a certain bareness in all the rooms, a prominence of huge oak tables, & an absence of other decorations than bright pewter cups & china plates which looked ominous to my inquisitive gaze. It seemed as though a great deal must have been sold, of those small portable things that make a room look furnished. But my hostesses dignity forbade me to suggest that her house had ever been other than it was at present. And yet I could not help fancying a kind of wistfulness in the way she showed me into rooms that were almost empty, compared the present Page 662 →poverty to days of greater affluence, & had it on the tip of her tongue to tell me that "Things had once been better." She seemed half apologetic, too, as she led me through a succession of bedrooms, & one or two rooms that might have served for sitting rooms if people had had leisure to sit there, as though she wished to show me that she was quite aware of the discrepancy between such a house & her own sturdy figure. All this being as it was, I did not like to ask the questions that interested me most—whether they had any books? & I was beginning to feel that I had kept the good woman from her sewing machine long enough, when she suddenly looked out of the window, hearing a whistle below, & shouted something about coming in to dinner. Then she turned to me with some shyness, but an expression of true hospitality, & begged me to "Sit down to dinner" with them. "John, my husband, knows a sight more than I do of these old things of his, & I know he's glad enough to find some one to talk to. It's in his blood, I tell him" she laughed, & I saw no good reason why I should not accept the invitation. Now John did not fall so easily beneath any recognized heading as his wife did. He was a man of middle age & middle size, dark of hair & complexion, with a pallor of skin that did not seem natural to a farmer; & a drooping moustache which he smoothed slowly with one well shaped hand as he spoke. His eye was hazel & bright, but I fancied a hint of suspicion when its glance rested upon me. He began to speak however, with even more of a Norfolk accent than his wife; & his voice, & dress asserted that he was, in truth if not altogether in appearance, a solid Norfolk farmer.

He nodded merely when I told him that his wife had had the kindness to show me his house. And then, looking at her with a twinkle in his eye he remarked, "If she had her way the old place would be left to the rats. The house is too big, & there are too many ghosts. Eh Betty." She merely smiled, as though her share of the argument had been done long ago.

I thought to please him by dwelling upon its beauties, & its age; but he seemed little interested by my praises, munched largely on cold beef, & adding "ayes" and "noes" indifferently.

A picture, painted perhaps in the time of Charles the First, which hung above his head, has so much the look of him had his collar & tweed been exchanged for a ruff & a silk doublet, that I made the obvious comparison.

"O aye," he said, with no great show of interest, "that's my grandfather; or my grandfathers grandfather. We deal in grandfathers here."

"Was that the Martyn who fought at the Bogne" asked Betty negligently while she pressed me to take another slice of beef.

"At the Bogne" exclaimed her husband, with query and even irritation— "Why, my good woman, your thinking of Uncle Jasper. This fellow was in his grave long before the Bogne. His name's Willoughby," he went on speaking to me, as though he wished me to understand the matter thoroughly; because a blunder about such a simple fact was unpardonable, even though the fact itself might not be of great interest.

"Willouby Martyn: bom 1625 died 1685: he fought at Marston Moor as Captain of a Troop of Norfolk men. We were always royalists. He was exiled in Page 663 →the Protectorate, went to Amsterdam; bought a bay horse off the Duke of Newcastle there; we have the breed still; he came back here at the Restoration, married Sally Hampton—of the Manor, but they died out last generation, & had six children, four sons & two daughters. He bought the Lower Meadow you know Betty" he jerked at his wife, to goad her unaccountably sluggish memory.

"I call him to mind well enough now" she answered, placidly.

"He lived here all the last part of his life; died of small pox, or what they called small pox then; & his daughter Joan caught it from him. They're buried in the same grave in the church yonder." He pointed his thumb, & went on with his dinner. All this was volunteered as shortly & even curtly as though he were performing some necessary task, which from long familiarity had become quite uninteresting to him; though for some reason he had still to repeat it.

I could not help showing my interest in the story, although I was conscious that my questions did not entertain my host.

"You seem to have a queer liking for these old fathers of mine" he commented, at last, with an odd little scowl of humorous irritation. "You must show her the pictures after dinner, John," put in his wife; "& all the old things."

"I should be immensely interested," I said, "but I must not take up your time."

"O John knows a quantity about them; he's wonderful learned about pictures."

"Any fool knows his own ancestors, Betty;" growled her husband; "still, if you wish to see what we have, Madam, I shall be proud to show you." The courtesy of the phrase, & the air with which he held the door open for me, made me remember the 'y' in his name.

He showed me round the Hall, pointing with a riding crop to one dark canvas after another; & rapping out two or three unhesitating words of description at each; they were hung apparently in chronological order, & it was clear in spite of the dirt & the dark that the later portraits were feebler examples of the art, & represented less distinguished looking heads. Military coats became less & less frequent, & in the 18th century the male Martyns were represented [in] snuff coloured garments of a homely cut, & were briefly described as "Farmers" or "him who sold the Fen Farm" by their descendant. Their wives & daughters at length dropped out altogether, as though in time a portrait had come to be looked upon more as the necessary appendage of the head of the house, rather than as the right which beauty by itself could claim.

Still, I could trace no sign in the man's voice that he was following the decline of his family with his riding crop, for there was neither pride nor regret in his tone; indeed it kept its level note, as of one who tells a tale so well known that the words have been rubbed smooth of meaning.

"Theres the last of them—my father" he said at length, when we had slowly traversed the four sides of the Hall; I looked upon a crude canvas, painted in the early 60ties I gathered, by some travelling painter with a literal brush. Perhaps the unskilful hand had brought out the roughness of the features; & the harshness of the complexion; had found it easier to paint the farmer than to Page 664 →produce the subtle balance which one might gather, blent in the father as in the son. The artist had stuffed his sitter into a black coat, & wound a stiff white tie round his neck; the poor gentleman had never felt at ease in them, yet.

"And now, Mr Martyn," I felt bound to say, "I can only thank you, & your wife for ..."

"Stop a moment," he interrupted, "we're not done yet. There are the books."

His voice had a half comic doggedness about it; like one who is determined, in spite of his own indifference to the undertaking, to make a thorough job of it.

He opened a door & bade me enter a small room, or rather office; for the table heaped with papers, & the walls lined with ledgers, suggested the room where business is transacted by the master of an estate. There were pads and brushes for ornament; & there were mostly dead animals, raising lifeless paws, & grinning, with plaster tongues, from various brackets & cases.

"These go back beyond the pictures;" he said, as he stopped & lifted a great parcel of yellow papers with an effort. They were not bound, or kept together in any way, save by a thick cord of green silk, with bars at either end; such as you use to transfix bundles of greasy documents—butchers bills, & the years receipts.

"Thats the first lot," he said ruffling the leaves with his fingers, like a pack of cards; "that's no 1:1480 to 1500:" I gasped, as anyone may judge: but the temperate voice of Martyn reminded me that enthusiasm was out of place, here; indeed enthusiasm began to look like a very cheap article when contrasted with the genuine thing.

"Ah indeed; that's very interesting; may I look?" was all I said, though my undisciplined hand shook a little when the bundle was carelessly dropped into it. Mr Martyn indeed offered to fetch a duster before desecrating my white skin; but I assured him it was of no consequence, too eagerly perhaps, because I had feared that there might be some more substantial reason why I should not hold these precious papers.

While he bent down before a book case, I hastily looked at the first inscription on the parchment. "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn," I spelt out, "kept by her at Martyn's Hall, in the county of Norfolk the year of our Lord 1480."

"My grandmother Joans diary" interrupted Martyn, turning round with his arm full of books. "Queer old Lady she must have been. I could never keep a diary myself. Never kept one beyond the 10th of February, though I tried often. But here you see," he leant over me, turning the pages, & pointing with his finger, "here is January, February, March, April—so on—a whole twelve months."

"Have you read it, then?" I asked, expecting, nay, hoping that he would say no.

"O yes, I've read it;" he remarked casually, as though that were but a simple undertaking. "It took me some time to get used to the writing, & the old girls spelling—is odd. But there are some queer things in it. I learnt a deal about the land from her, one way & another." He tapped it meditatively.

"Do you know her history too?" I asked.

"Joan Martyn," he began in the voice of a showman, "was bom 1495. She Page 665 →was the daughter of Giles Martyn. She was his only daughter. He had three sons though; we always have sons. She wrote this Diary when she was 25: She lived here all her life—never married. Indeed she died at the age of 30. I daresay you might see her tomb down there with the rest of them."

"Now this" he said, touching a thick book bound in parchment, "is more interesting to my mind. This is the household book of Jasper for the year 1583. See how the old gentleman kept his accounts; what they eat & drank; how much meat & bread & wine cost; how many servants he kept—his horses, carriages, beds, furniture, everything. There's method for you. I have a set of ten of them." He spoke of them with greater pride than I had heard him speak of any of his possessions yet.

"This one too makes good reading of a winters night" he went on, "This is the Stud book of Willoughby; you remember Willoughby."

"The one who bought the horse of the Duke, & died of small pox," I repeated glibly.

"That's so," he nodded. "Now this is really fine stuff this one." He went on, like a conoisseur, talking of some favourite brand of port. "I wouldn't sell this for £20. Here are the names & the pedigrees,—lives—values—descendants; all written out like a bible." He rolled some of the strange old names of these dead horses upon his tongue, as though he relished the sound like wine. "Ask my wife if I cant tell 'em all without the book" he laughed, shutting it carefully & placing it on the shelf.

"These are the Estate books; they go down to this year; there's the last of 'em. Here's our family history." He unrolled a long strip of parchment, upon which an elaborate genealogical tree had been inscribed, with many faded flourishes & extravagances of some mediaeval pen. The boughs spread so widely by degrees, that they were lopped unmercifully by the limits of the sheet—a husband depending, for instance, with a family of 10 children & no wife. Fresh ink at the base of all recorded the names of Jasper Martyn, my host, & his wife Elizabeth Clay: they had three sons. His finger travelled sagaciously down the tree, as though it were so well used to this occupation that it could almost be trusted to perform it by itself. Martyns voice murmured on as though it repeated a list of Saints or Virtues in some monotonous prayer.

"Yes," he concluded, rolling up the sheet & laying it by, "I think I like those two best. I could say them through with my eyes shut. Horses or Grandfathers!"

"Do you study here a great deal then?" I asked, somewhat puzzled by this strange man.

"I've no time for study, he returned, rather roughly, as tho' the farmer cropped up in him at my question. "I like to read something easy in the winter nights; & in the morning too, if I wake early. I keep them by my bed sometimes. I say them to send myself to sleep. It's easy to know the names of ones own family. They come natural. But I was never any good at book learning, more's the pity."

Asking my permission, he lit a pipe & began puffing forth great curls of smoke, as he ranged the volumes in order before him. But I kept No One, the Page 666 →bundle of parchment sheets, in my hand, nor did he seem to miss it from the rest.

"You would be sorry to part with any of these, I daresay?" I hazarded, at last, covering my real eagerness with an attempt at a laugh.

"Part with them?" he returned, "what should I part with them for?" The idea was evidently so remote that my question had not, as I feared, irritated his suspicions.

"No, no," he went on, "I find them far too useful for that. Why, Madam, these old papers have stood out for my rights in a court of law before now; besides, a man likes to keep his family round him; I should feel—well kind of lonely if you take my meaning, without my Grandfathers & Grandmothers, & Uncles & Aunts." He spoke as though he confessed a weakness.

"O" I said, "I quite understand—"

"I daresay you have the same feeling yourself Madam & down here, in a lonely place like this, company means more than you could well believe. I often think I should'nt know how to pass the time, if it were'nt for my relations."

No words of mine, or attempts at a report of his words, can give the curious impression which he produced, as he spoke, that all these "relations" Grandfathers of the time of Elizabeth, nay Grandmothers of the time of Edward the Fourth were just, so to speak, brooding round the comer; There was none of the pride of "ancestry" in his voice but merely the personal affection of a son for his parents. All generations seemed bathed in his mind in the same clear & equable light: it was not precisely the light of the present day, but it certainly was not what we commonly call the light of the past. And it was not romantic, it was very sober, & very broad & the figures stood out in it, solid & capable, with a great resemblance, I suspect, to what they were in the flesh.

It really needed no stretch of the imagination to perceive that Jasper Martyn might come in from his farm & his fields, & sit down here alone to a comfortable gossip with his "relations"; whenever he chose; & that their voices were very nearly as audible to him as those of the labourers in the field below, which came floating in, upon the level afternoon sunlight through the open window.

But my original intention of asking whether he would sell, almost made me blush when I remembered it now: so irrelevant & so impertinent. And also, strange though it may seem, I had lost for the time my proper antiquarian zeal; all my zest for old things, & the little distinguishing marks of age, left me, because they seemed the trivial & quite immaterial accidents of large substantial things. There was really no scope for antiquarian ingenuity in the case of Mr Martyn's ancestors, anymore than it needed an antiquary to expound the history of the man himself.

They are, he would have told me, all flesh & blood like I am; & the fact that they have been dead for four or five centuries makes no more difference to them, than the glass you place over a canvas changes the picture beneath it.

But on the other hand, if it seemed impertinent to buy it, it seemed natural, if perhaps a little simpleminded, to borrow.

"Well Mr Martyn," I said at length, with less eagerness & less trepidation Page 667 →than I could have thought possible under the circumstances, "I am thinking of staying for a week or so in this neighbourhood—at The Swan at Gartham indeed—I should be much obliged to you if you would lend me these papers to look through during my stay. This is my card. Mr. Lathom, (the great landowner of the place) will tell you all about me." Instinct told me that Mr Martyn was not the man to trust the benevolent impulses of his heart.

"O Madam, theres no need to bother about that;" he said, carelessly, as though my request were not of sufficient importance to need his scrutiny. "If these old papers please you, I'm sure your welcome to 'em." He seemed a little surprised, however, so that I added,

"I take a great interest in family histories, even when they're not my own."

"It's amusing eno', I daresay, if you have the time" he assented politely; but I think his opinion of my intelligence was lowered.

"Which would you like" he asked, stretching his hand towards the Household Books of Jasper; & the Stud book of Willoughby.

"Well I think I'll begin with your grandmother Joan" I said; "I like beginning at the beginning."

"O very well," he smiled; "though I don't think you'll find anything out of the way in her; She was very much the same as the rest of us—as far as I can see, not remarkable—"

But all the same, I walked off with Grandmother Joan beneath my arm; Betty insisted upon wrapping her in brown paper, to disguise the queer nature of the package, for I refused to let them send it over as they wished, by the boy who took the letters—on his bicycle.

Ed. Susan M. Squier & Louise A. DeSalvo. Twentieth Century Literature 25 (1979): 240-251.

From "Byron and Mr. Briggs"

3.

We are on the brink of a serious argument; but with a little circumspection, it may be possible to keep on the outskirts. The qualities that a book should contain in the abstract, the qualities that it does contain in the flesh, have been discussed and analysed from the times of Aristotle to the present moment. Aristotle, Dryden, Addison, Johnson, Coleridge, Boileau, Keats, Sainte Beuve, Matthew Arnold, Taine, Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont—to go no further, have all said their say and said it (as one feels in reading them) with a conviction which is only roused in men's minds, and conveyed to the minds of others, when they have been looking on the truth. That this truth is never the same for two generations, or for two human beings,—let alone for two human beings of Page 668 →genius—is a fact which may be distressing, if you wish to get the matter settled once and for all; but has to be faced. At any rate differences of critical theory and differences of critical judgment are by this time sufficiently notorious. Any parrot can repeat the usual string of blunders. Johnson ridiculed Tristram Shandy. Arnold thought Shelleys letters better than his poetry. Coleridge fell prostrate at the feet of Mr Bowles. The parrot has said enough. Then, any pig can sort the critics into schools. There is the biographic; the psychological; the socio-political; the historical; the aesthetic; the impressionist; the scientific; the analytic. Doubtless there are more; but each can be traced back to some man of genius who was so convinced of the truth of what he saw that he imposed his conviction upon others. But the men who read in this way, with an overmastering bias in this that or the other direction, are the critics. Pelt them with volumes taken from each of the twenty seven divisions into which modern literature is divided and they will somehow order them into conformity with a principle arrived at by reading, and reasoning, and the light of individual genius. But the reviewer never penetrates deep enough to lay hold upon a principle. Like a man in a shooting gallery, he sees books move steadily past him. Bang! He lets fly. The rabbit is missed; but he has only just time to reload before taking aim at the pheasant.

Therefore it is useless to look in any scrap book of old reviews for a method. You may find a personality, but that is quite a different thing, and (with E. K. Sanders at the back of my mind) I should like to discover what the value of a reviewer is, taking it for granted that he has no method, but only a personality—that he is in short much nearer the ordinary reader, of whom there are multitudes, than the critic of whom, with great luck, there is one in a century.

4.

But the common reader is a person of great importance. Dr Johnson rejoiced "to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours." In an age without a critic, [and there is none to be found in England at the moment,] literature both past and present must rest in the hands of the people who continue to read it. Milton is alive in the year 1922 and of a certain size and shape only because some thousands of insignificant men and women are holding his page at this moment before their eyes. But when Coleridge was lecturing about Shakespeare, or Dryden was writing about poetry, common opinion had an influence to guide it. You shut your Shakespeare and went to hear Coleridge; you read the preface to [long blank] and your judgment of poetry was shaped accordingly. But to have this effect, an influence must be powerful. Acting first upon the scholars and reviewers it must by them be spread abroad among the multitude. In our time there are scholars by the score and reviewers by the thousand; but there is no critic to point the way.

Page 669 →

5.

General statements are convenient and no doubt sometimes they are true. But this one has in it obvious elements of falsehood should you descend from the general to the particular—should you look into the way in which reading is commonly done now, and not imagine how it was done a hundred years ago by old Mr Briggs who drove up from Kensington to hear Coleridge in snowy weather, only to find that Coleridge had forgotten to come.

The truth is that reading is kept up because people like reading. The common reader is formidable and respectable and even has power over great critics and great masterpieces in the long run because he likes reading and will not let even Coleridge do his reading for him. How many thousands I know not, but certainly there are many thousands who never pick up a book on a bookstall for half a minute without getting some kind of shock from it. Expose them to something violent, like King Lear, and the shock entirely obliterates Aristotle, Dryden, Addison, Johnson, Coleridge, Boileau, Diderot, Sainte-Beuve &c &c. The whole hierarchy is powerless to unseat the judgment of an ignorant boy or girl who has read the play to the end. It is all very well, when the impression has spent itself, to take down Coleridge and Coleridge will delight and instruct, but only in the margin of the mind. It is I who have read the play. I hold it in my brain. I am directly in touch with Shakespeare. No third person can explain or alter or even throw much light upon our relationship.

This then is the very heart of the business—it is this which sends the blood coursing through the whole of the old book & the new. It is this which raises libraries and draws up out of the air myriads upon myriad of new books. But it is an unguided passion, voluntary individual & lawless and thus capable of doing enormous harm as a glance at contemporary literature will prove. Take the case of Mr Briggs for example (1795-1859). He was convinced by the eloquent Mr Coleridge that Measure for Measure was the most painful of Shakespeares plays "like-wise degrading to the character of women"; but next time he read Measure for Measure he had forgotten what Coleridge said; or his own ideas seemed fresher or his wife bounced into the study & kissed him on the top of the head that very moment. At any rate Coleridges principles, eloquent, profound, and original as they were, applied to old poetry, to poetry in general, and Mr Briggs never once thought of Coleridge when he laid it down a few weeks later that this new book by Mr Keats was trash.

6.

And Briggs' grandchildren? This spectacle maker of Cornhill with his taste for literature and this loathing for Keats left a large number of descendants. Many have gone out into the world and fought and conquered and made money and died rather honourably in obscure Indian villages with nothing but a copy of Page 670 →Dickens and or a little volume of Shakespeare to keep them company. A taste for reading is very hard to kill. At the same time, how are we to say what it amounts to in the flesh? Briggs the Colonel died with his Shakespeare; but never formulated his views upon the poetic drama. Briggs the stockbroker read Darwin; and burnt Swinburne. Mrs Briggs (who was a Grant from Dundee) knew the Waverley novels by heart but she could never abide George Eliot. Between them the different generations must have devoured half the London Library and the whole of Mudies. Silently, voraciously, like a locust or a caterpillar. As for leaving any record of their opinions save by crosses and notes of exclamation in the margin (which staffs of librarians are always engaged in rubbing out) that was, and that is, none of their business. They read then for pleasure; they read now for pleasure; and if you catch them laying down the law in private about Mr Wells' latest or Mr Joyce's most outrageous, they do it violently enough; but always with a sort of shrug of the shoulders as if to say "That's what I think. But who am I?"

It would be difficult to persuade the grandchildren of Briggs who knew Coleridge that Dr Johnson respected them: that they decide all claim to poetical honours: that their views matter so much as to be gone into at some length and made the subject of a book by a distant relation.

Yet that was the conclusion to which my reading of old newspaper articles finally led me. The views of the grandchildren of Briggs matter; and we reviewers are, almost all of us, [descended from the spectacle maker of Comhill.] The genealogists may dispute this claim; but if one has waited for three weeks to get Byrons letters from the Library, then, according to my definition, one is a grandchild of Briggs.

[7.]

X X X X X X

Byron was a fine bold boy and wrote far better letters from abroad than his people had a right to expect. He should have stayed an undergraduate for ever, dominating his own group but strictly kept in order by Kinnaird & Hobhouse; also here are women; and he must needs be a man of the world, and learn the trade from that tight lipped hard faced prosaic peeress Lady Melbourne who soon brought out the worst of him,—the dancing master and dandy, so proud of his conquests though so obviously ashamed of his foot. Caroline Lamb, insane but generous, would have made a better wife than the mathematical Miss Milbanke. The big boy who limped off the field in a rage because he had been clean bowled for two or three runs needed what women call "managing." But what woman could give it him? He was dangerous; a treacherous lap dog. In the midst of sentiment down came the sledge hammer of fact. Who could be more unflinching and direct? Indeed one is inclined to wonder why he thought himself a poet. Presumably the fashion of the age dictated, and Byron was impressed by fashions. Yet his description of the Wedderburne affair proves, what Page 671 →his poetry hints, that prose was his medium; satire his genius. He goes to Venice, and is there a single phrase to show that he saw it? Does he even momentarily abstract himself from the Countesses and the Carnivals to think, on the Lido, as Wordsworth thought in rustic Cumberland, how she had held the gorgeous East in fee, and men must mourn when even the showod [sic. shadow?] of what once was great has passed away? No such phrase, with its aloofness, contemplation, and solicitude for the fate of mankind in general is possible from Byron. All is immediate, personal, and of this world. Yet it would be difficult to rank Don Juan much lower than the Prelude or to forget hours spent racing before the wind through Byrons Cantos, when Wordsworths stanzas lay cold, unruffled, shut in and shadowed by the rocks of his own self-centredness.

Byron was a novelist—that is to say he came at his conception through his observation of actual life; whereas a poet thinks of life in general, or so intensely of his own in particular as to include the general experience. This he expresses in language exact and enduring. Byron on the other hand writes the perfection of prose. Compare, for example, his letters with the stiff and stilted compositions by Shelley here, unfortunately, placed beside them. Sir Timothy's conduct is (for the first time) intelligible. To have this prig for one's son, to listen to his preachings intolerable. But Mary loved him. She can hardly write for fury that a servant girl should slander him, and meeting Mrs Hoppner in the street cut her dead. All this must have seemed rather extreme and a little bourgeois to Byron; whose range was so wide, whose grasp was so vigorous, whose blood was so blue. And so he frittered his life away; and grew very bitter before the end, which was in the grand style, as the death of Ajax was; fate bowling him out before he had made half the runs he should have made. And up fly our caps as he limps off the field in a rage.

x x x x x x

Let us pull this page to pieces observing that it was written quickly, not from notes but from recollection, and is an attempt to give an impression remaining in the mind an hour or two after finishing a book. Some reading is implied, more than could be expected of a working man, or of any but a very exceptional bank clerk. On the other hand, no Byron expert and no scholar could write so carelessly. A critic would have disregarded all the personalities and would have fixed upon the aesthetic problems here glimpsed and brushed aside. But it has, in spite of compression, one very marked and for our purposes very important characteristic. The reader has obviously from the first page to the last read with a view to forming a whole. As each page is turned you can see him hastily rigging up, from reading or experience, something to serve for background; roughly setting the characters in action, deciding, ordering their relations; making a dart at their qualities; hazarding a guess at the character of literature; and shaping the whole little world as it grows in his mind into likeness with some conception which he derives partly from his time (he is pagan, not Christian) partly from Page 672 →private experiences and qualities peculiar to himself. "He", do we say? But it is obvious from the shape of each sentence, from the tilt [& atmosphere & proportion of the whole] that he is a woman. "But Mary loved him". The cat is out of the bag, and since no one can put her back again had better be given the run of the house.

But the writer's sex is not of interest; nor need we dwell upon the peculiarities of temperament which make one person's reading of Byron's letters different from another's. It is the quality that they have in common that is interesting— that the reading of ordinary readers has in common, that is to say, for it is clear that scholars and critics read differently, in a way of their own.

8.

To make a whole—it is that which we have in common. Our reading is always urged on by the instinct to complete what we read, which is, for some reason, one of the most universal and profound of our instincts. You may see it at work any night among the passengers in a third class railway carriage. Is he related to the woman opposite? No they work in the same office. In love then? No; she wears a wedding ring. Going home then to the same suburb? Ah, yes. "We shall meet on Tuesday". A bridge party no doubt. . . . "I'm sure it would pay to start another hotel there" from which it appears that they belong to a group of people in the habit of going to St Andrews to play golf in the summer.

Everyone plays this familiar game. Everyone feels the desire to add to a single impression the others that go to complete it. Here a mans face catches the attention; instinctively you give him character, relationships, occupation, habits, desires, until some sort of completeness is achieved. There [must be] something disagreeable to the mind in allowing an impression of any force to remain isolated. It must at once [be] made habitable for others; one must, for ones own comfort, have a whole in ones mind: fragments are unendurable. So it is in reading Byron's letters. There too, in the impression quoted we see the same desire at work to complete, to supply background, relationship, motive, while we are rounding the whole with a running commentary which flings out at the end, "Fate bowled him unfairly. Up fly our caps, as he limps off the field in a rage."

The book is finished: so too, the train reaches Putney. Our fellow passengers get out, but not before we are fairly easy in our minds about them. They have their lives; they have their place in the scheme.—although we have to admit that our attention was intermittent, that we read a column in the evening newspaper, and that after the woman said "We shall meet on Tuesday" a glaring red theatre shot up on the right; a backstreet in Wandsworth was illuminated; so that the three dots which mark the interruption of this splendour and misery threw some strange significance upon the man's next remark that it would pay to start a hotel there.

It is hardly necessary to say that such wholes as these are extremely imperfeet, Page 673 →& probably highly inaccurate. Very likely there was not a word of truth in our re-construction of the travellers lives. Certainly if we examine the fragment on Byrons letters we shall find slips enough in five hundred words to infuriate a scholar. Byron did not make "two or three runs"; Wordsworth did not live in "rustic Cumberland" when he wrote the sonnet On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic here misquoted; The Prelude is not strictly speaking written in stanzas; and the use of metaphors to convey critical judgments is generally an attempt to conceal under artificial flower vagueness and poverty of thought. That is all true; and to write of facts inaccurately is to impair the validity, even artistic value of the [writing] and no one would be so foolish as not to wish it otherwise. But given our conditions, given our education, it is inevitable; given above all those two instincts which are so deeply implanted in our souls—the instinct to complete; the instinct to judge. Give us a fragment and we will make a whole of it; give us a book and we will judge it for ourselves.

9.

Thus then in some such terms as this perhaps the common reader may be defined; but who shall say anything about his partner in the enterprise—this vast, bewildering, uncharted, perpetually increasing and changing volume of literature? Twenty seven divisions, we say, have been driven through the mass; but what if they are not water tight? if biography leaks through into history and history into fiction, and criticism is stained with the juice of them all? In what sense can we talk, even lazily over the fire, of making a whole? To make a whole even of one man, Lord Byron, must we not have read some three hundred volumes, and a good many papers still waiting to be published?

Ed. Edward A. Hungerford. Yale Review 68 (1979). 327-335.

Notes for Reading at Random

18th Sept 19[3]40

Reading at Random. or Turning the Page

Notes.

To begin with English country before Eth [Elizabeth]

The effect of country upon writers. Hall. Holingshed.1

The idea of the book is to find the end of a ball of

string & wind out. Let one book suggest another.

Keep to time sequence. Pass from criticism to biography.

Page 674 →

Lives of people. Always follow the genuine scent—the

idea of the moment. No 'periods': No text book.

Read very widely Write rather from memory.

Oct 3rd

The Life of a Book.

Take a living book & trace, vanishing; its family:

But wh. book? But keep very free.

Harrisons State of England.2

His mastiff. Months with an R in them.

How many departments a person has: needing historians,

psychologists, poets &c. to interpret.

The forces telling on H. his attitude toward the court, the

Church. His regrets for logs of wood as pillows.

Squire Waterton. The continuity of tradition. The RC

Church as a carrier. Harrison seen by Furnivall. What F

paid for butter in 1878. The infection; also the medium.

The snatch of song: If I were in my castle of Boverly.

The song making instinct. The map of London.

Alfred Tennyson, Mrs GH Lewes had suggested: a

meeting was held in March ... in Gower St. at 8.

This is continuity—the [extension] certain emotions always in

being: felt by people always.

for the 19th century. Aug. [Augustus] Hare. his mother (repulsive)

Scene illustrating Henry James's subject. Osbert on

Two Generations. Sitwell meets Hare.3

Crot, Ninn, & Pulley—the 3 influences.

Might <begin> be a fictitious review of a [book] hist, of Eng. Lit.

What it omits. Try to write lit the other way round.

define the influences: the affect; the growth; the

surrounding, also the inner, current all left out in

text books. Written for Pulley. Semiramis—more on

Aspasia—witches & fairies.

Division of novelists into ventriloquists: soliloquists.

What is creation? The [old in] Mr Fs aunt.

The virtue of our age that people dont rest on their

laurels. Perpetually broken up. Renewing. No

conclusions. Perhaps the necessary effect of coming

Page 675 →

continuing after so many other writers: a great choice of

models—examples. For instance, Reads admiration for Ruskin . .

Reviving the old fashions: No great poet. See Yeats. The

times too big?—or too close to us—for great poetry.

Ideas for the shape of the book.

To begin with the country. The eye the youthful

sense. Our floods. This brings back the wildness.

Out of doors. Indoors. no study no library.

Songs sung at the door.

The importance of the audience.

No public, in our sense.

Anonymity.

The song . . the call to our primitive instincts.

Rhythm—Sound. Sight.

Harrison: at the right distance, at last, to see

England. No one looked before that.

Piers Ploughman. (after Chaucer)

This first chapter. [Th] Some single figure—Bess of Hardwick.5

The pageant. The Masque. The play.

The song singers. About Shre [Shakespeare]: the person is consumed: Sre never

breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about

him: Completely expressed. When the

incantation ceases, we see the person.

That opera took over the poetic play?

separate article.

Goldsmith. The patron.

Congreve . . . The French. Madame de Sévigné.

Group: La Rd. [La Rochefoucauld] &c.

Gibbon . . .

Capt. Marryatt.6

19th Century. The scene fr. [from] which Henry James

took his material. Memoirs

—Single figures. all cut off—compared

with Ethans.

Page 676 →

Coleridge.

[The Fren] The 19th Cent, to consist of outlines of people.

Skip present day.

A Chapter on the future.

From Duncan & Vanessa yesterday I got this idea. A

book explaining lit. from our common standpoint, to painters.

This wd. then be the angle. [Our] It would begin

from the writers angle . . That is: we all feel

the desire to create. The curiosity to know about

others in the same condition. This wd. lead to

an introduction: about the germ of creation: its

thwartings: our society: interruption: conditions.

Can we then see the others, in the same state—

I shd. therefore take a poem & build up round it

the society wh. [c] helps it. I shd. take a

very old anon. poem. I shd. distinguish between

the actual scene: the weather: the house; the

patron; society: make it chronological.

Often deviate. Bring in Latin. Italy—Greece.

The universality of the creative instinct. . .

Stone, wool, words paint. discuss words.

Always keep the writer in the foreground. Make out a

rough plan of the different helps & hindrances:

A sketch—a guess.

The patron. The girl at the door. The wind & the
rain.

Evolve [on] the town: the Great house. Fill

England with people. Take samples. [No] Both of

art & of the outer pressure.

Then increase the number of figures.

Describe the growth of London. The small country town.

The audience at the play. At the fire side.

Keep a running commentary upon the External.

The "modem" . . the growth of articulateness.

The split into several languages for writers.

Page 677 →

Advertisements, Reviews: travel. Society. Make a
sketch of 19th Cent. society . .

1. Anon.

2. [The audience] The ear & the eye.

3. The individual. 3. The audience.

4. Words?

[The eye & the]

The ear & the eye.

Music . . rhythm. The young ladies singing

[The] The chorus. The sound. The song coming in.

The nonsense. The Beauty. something very deep—
primitive. not yet extinct.

The eye. Spenser. The pictures.

Spenser. The Renaissance . . . looking across? at Italy.

Allegory—making thoughts visible . . .

The connection between seeing & writing:

Michael Angelo. Leonardo. Blake. Rossetti.

a twin gift. Wh. shall be bom. depends on

Nin Crot & Pulley.

The writer never becomes a musician . . .

too technical?

What is "manner" in writing—Manners—the influence of the patron.

The big house where the book is read.

description of Penshurst. Of Lady Rich: Lady. Bess of Hardwick.

Sir P Sidney. Spenser.

The artist.

Language.

What [works] tells on an artist: the thing seen: the framework:
the eye. the ear: the senses:

Page 678 →

the thing properly ended.

the individual. the soul.

The difference between reading & seeing: acting:

the word heard. Its solidity: its depths.

How an actor cuts deeper to the bone.

The anonymous element in the play.

Chaucer: the society he wrote for small & noble.

took his points. hit off real people.

Society.

The relation between the small house & the big.

The Ethan psychology.

Witches.

The nimbus of ignorance. And no Engsh past.

The writer—[the f] what is his mark? That he

enjoys dispassionately: has a split in his consciousness?

The condition of the Etn [Elizabethan] writer who had no

literary past; only read classics in translation

Did Shre [Shakespeare] read Chaucer?

Irresponsibility. Words without associations.

no conventions: no deference: cd. invent—

When [di] was the first theatre built?

The theatre for those who cant read.

brought in pit & gallery. But did the
nobles 'go to the play'?

Influence of the bible on prose. The biblical style limited

& emphatic.

The untaught wrote more as we do—the Bacon letters

She quotes Latin & Greek. The servant is racy

" 'Anon' and 'The Reader': Virginia Woolf's Last Essays." Brenda R. Silver. Twentieth Century Literature 25(1979):373-379.

Page 679 →

NOTES

The title "Notes for Reading at Random" is written on a piece of tape stuck on the cover of the notebook in which Woolf recorded her ideas for her new book. Most if not all of the entries were made before Woolf started writing "Anon" on November 24, 1940; the title "or Turning the Page" was added after the original entry was made. The notes consist of seven unnumbered manuscript pages; the *** in the text indicates page breaks. The transcription of the entries approximates as closely as possible their appearance in the manuscript. The following editorial symbols and abbreviations appear in "Notes for Reading at Random," "Anon," and "The Reader":

[word] = a reading editorially supplied;
[word] = a deletion editorially restored;
<word> = an insertion, usually above the line, made by Woolf;
<word> = an insertion deleted but editorially restored;
[?word] = an uncertain reading;
[. . .] = an illegible word or words.
  1. 1. Possibly Edward Hall (The Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and York) and certainly Raphael Holinshed, both chroniclers of English life. Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) include the Description of England by William Harrison referred to later.
  2. 2. William Harrison's Description of England in Shakspere's Youth, ed. Fumivall.
  3. 3. Woolf's review of Two Generations, edited by Osbert Sitwell ("Georgiana and Florence"), was published in the Listener, October 31, 1940.
  4. 4. Herbert Read's autobiography, Annals of Innocence (1940), the impetus for Woolf's comments cited at the beginning of this chapter.
  5. 5. Elizabeth Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, considered after the other Bess— Queen Elizabeth—the most extraordinary woman of her age. Asked by Vita Sackville-West to write a biography of Bess of Harwick, Woolf replied that she would "make her a Common Reader" (Letters 6:445).
  6. 6. With the exception of "The French . . .," all the writers listed here were the subjects of articles published by Woolf between 1934 and 1940: "Oliver Goldsmith" (1934), "Congreve's Comedies" (1937), "The Historian and 'The Gibbon' " and "Reflections at Sheffield Place" (1937), both about Gibbon, and "The Captain's Death Bed" (1935), the captain being Frederick Marryat. Woolf's essay "Madame de Sévigné" was written in May 1939, though she continued to read her letters through at least the end of 1940.

Anon

"For many centuries after Britain became an island" the historian says "the untamed forest was king. Its moist and mossy floor was hidden from Heavens eye by a close drawn curtain woven of innumerable tree tops".1 On those matted boughs innumerable birds sang; but their song was only heard by a few skin clad hunters in the clearings. Did the desire to sing come to one of those huntsmen because he heard the birds sing, and so rested his axe against the tree for a moment? But the tree had to be felled; and a hut made from its branches before the human voice sang too.

Page 680 →

By a bank as I lay

Musing myself alone, hey ho!

A birdes voice

Did me rejoice,

Singing before the day;

And me thought in her lay

She said, winter was past, hey ho!

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it. The audience was itself the singer; "Terly, terlow" they sang; and "By, by lullay" filling in the pauses, helping out with a chorus. Every body shared in the emotion of Anons song, and supplied the story. Anon sang because spring has come; or winter is gone; because he loves; because he is hungry, or lustful; or merry; or because he adores some God. Anon is sometimes man; sometimes woman. He is the common voice singing out of doors, He has no house. He lives a roaming life crossing the fields, mounting the hills, lying under the hawthorn to listen to the nightingale.

By shutting out a chimney or a factory we can still see what Anon saw—the bird haunted reed whispering fen, the down and the green scar not yet healed along which he came when he made his journeys. He was a simple singer, lifting a song or a story from other peoples lips, and letting the audience join in the chorus. Sometimes he made a few lines that exactly matched his emotion— but there is no name to that song.2

Then when the houses had come together in some clearing in a ring, and roads, often flooded, often deep in mud, led from the cottage to the Manor, from the Manor to the Church in the middle, minstrels came, jugglers, bear leaders, singing their songs at the back door to the farm hands and the maid servants in the uncouth jargon of their native tongue.

Icham for woing al forwake

Wery no water in wore

Up stairs they spoke French.3 Anons words were as uncouth to the master and mistress as to us. Anon singing at the back door was despised. He had no name; he had no place. Yet, even if they felt contempt for the singer, whose body took its souls part in the song, they tolerated him. Even Kings and Queens the scholars tell us, must have their minstrel.4+ They needed his comment, his buffoonery. They kept him in the house, tolerating him, as we tolerate those who say out loud what we feel, but are too proud to admit. He used the outsiders privilege to mock the solemn, to comment upon the established. The church men [feared] and hated the anonymous singer. They did their best to < [. . .] >. They pressed him and his twin gift into the service of the church. He was to be found acting the Mass in the church; but, as he acted more and more his own art, he left the church, and staged his pageant in the churchyard, or later was given a Page 681 →pitch for his drama in the market place. Still he remained nameless, often ribald, obscene.

Yet during the silent centuries before the book was printed his was the only voice that was to be heard in England. Save for Anon singing his song at the back door the English might be a dumb race, a race of merchants, soldiers, priests; who left behind them stone houses, cultivated fields and great churches, but no words. It was Anon who gave voice to the old stories, who incited the peasants when he came to the back door to put off their working clothes and deck themselves in green leaves. He it was who found words for them to sing, when they went at the great seasons to do homage to the old pagan Gods. He taught them the songs they sung at Christmas and at midsummer. He led them to the haunted tree; to the well; to the old burial place where they did homage to the pagan gods. If we could see the village as it was before Chaucers time we should see tracks across the fields joining manor house to hovel, and hovel to church. Some of those paths of course were worn by soldiers and labourers. They must fight together and plough together if they were not to be conquered by man and nature. That connection as time goes on and [the] pen records the daily struggle, is still painfully recorded in old letter books and ledgers. It makes the staple of the old correspondence between the Pastons of Norfolk and the Betsons and Paycockes of Essex.5 But there was also the other less visible connection—the common belief. That track between the houses in the village has been grown over,—like the track along which the pilgrims rode to Canterbury.— no one rides that way now.6 But before Chaucers time it was trod daily. It led to the tree; to the well. In spring it led to the Maypole. At Midsummer they lit the bonfire on the hill. At Christmas the mummers acted Anons old play; and the boys came singing his wassailing song. The road led to the old graves, to the stones where in time past the English had done sacrifice. The peasants still went that way by instinct, in spring and summer and winter. The old Gods lay hidden beneath the new.7 It was to them led by Anon that they did worship, in their coats of green leaves, bearing swords in their hands, dancing through the houses, enacting their ancient parts.8

It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte DArthur he fixed the voice of Anon for ever. There we tap the reservoir of common belief that lay deep sunk in the minds of peasants and nobles. There in Malorys pages we hear the voice of Anon murmuring still. If Caxton himself doubted—King Arthur he objected never lived—there were still nobles and gentry who were positive. They said that you could see Gawaines skull at Dover; and the Round Table at Winchester; and "in other places Launcelots sword and many other things". So Caxton printed the old dream. He brought to the surface the old hidden world: It is a mixed world. There is London; and Carlisle; and St Albans; there is the Archbishop of Canterbury and St Pauls. The roads lead past London to castles where Knights lie enchanted; down the roads ride Queens on white mules; Morgan le Fay turns herself to stone; and a hand rises from a lake holding Excalibur. The story is told with a childs implicit belief. Page 682 →It has a childs love of particularity. Everything is stated. The beauty is in the statement, not in the suggestion. "So he went in and searched from chamber to chamber, and found his bed, but she was not there; then Balin looked into a little garden, and under a laurel tree he saw her lie upon a quilt of green samite and a knight with her, and under their heads grass and herbs".9 The world is seen without comment; did the writer know what beauty he makes us see?

But, save that self consciousness had not yet raised its mirror, the men and women are ourselves, seen out of perspective; elongated, foreshortened, but very old, with a knowledge of all good and all evil. They are already corrupt in this fresh world. They have evil dreams. Arthur is doomed; the Queens are lustful. There never was, it seems, a time when men and women were without memory; There never was a young world. Behind the English lay ages of toil and love. That is the world beneath our consciousness; the anonymous world to which we can still return. Of the writer the scholars can find something. But Malory is not distinct from his book. The voice is still the voice of Anon, telling his story about Kings and Queens who are base and heroic; vile and gentle, like ourselves, stripped of the encumbrances that time has wrapped about us.

Caxtons printing press foretold the end of that anonymous world; It is now written down; fixed; nothing will be added; even if the legend still murmers on, and still down in Somersetshire the peasants remember how "on the night of the full moon King Arthur and his men ride round the hill, and their horses are shod with silver". The printing press brought the past into existence. It brought into existence the man who is conscious of the past the man who sees his time, against a background of the past; the man who first sees himself and shows himself to us. The first blow has been aimed at Anon when the authors name is attached to the book. The individual emerges. His name is Holingshed; his name is also Harrison.10 Harrison emerging from the past tells us that he has a library; that he owns a mastiff; that he digs up Roman coins. He tells us that he has never been more than forty miles from Rad winter in Essex. Anon is losing his ambiguity. The present is becoming visible. Harrison sees the present against the settled recorded past. The present looks degenerate, raw, against that past. There is too much comfort now; the pillow has taken the place of the old log with a dip in the middle; there are too many chimneys. The young Shakespeares and Marlowes are not the men their fathers were. They are tender and subject to rheumatism. Also they dress most fantastically compared with their ancestors.

He does not see the mummers and the wassailers; he does not hear the voice of Anon; he scarcely listens even to the song of Chaucers Canterbury pilgrims. For the English past as Harrison saw it, served only to show up the material change— the change that had come over houses, furniture clothing. There was no English literature to show up the change in the mind. Anons song at the back door was as difficult for him to spell out as for us. & more painful. for [it] reminded him of his lack of intellectual ancestry. His intellectual pedigree only reached back to Chaucer, to Langland to Wycliffe. In order to have ancestors by way of the mind he must cross the channel his ancestors by way of the mind are the Greeks and Romans. His page is burdened with these proofs of good breeding—Henricus Cornelius Page 683 →Agrippa; Suetonius; Pliny, Cicero—he quotes them to prove his nobility of mind as we to prove ours quote the Elizabethans. He turns away from the present. He does not hear Anon singing at the back door; he ignores the actors who were acting their crude dramas in the market place. Upstairs he says in the great room "our ancient ladies of the court" are to be found reading histories and chronicles, the Greeks and the Latins as they sit at their needlework. And the scholars were reading the classics that were chained to the shelves in the college libraries. Yet in spite of the printed book, the common people were still at their lewd practices.

The preacher, going his round on horseback, from village to village found them at it and raised his voice in anger. "Riding on a journey homeward from London" Latimer about 1549 went to the Church to preach and found the door fast locked against him. For more than half an hour he waited; and at last "one of the parish came to me and said: Sir this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you, it is Robin Hoods day. The parish are gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood. I was fain there to give place to Robin Hood. I thought my Rochet would have been regarded, though I were not: but it would not serve, it was fain to give place to Robin Hoods men. It is no laughing matter, my friends, it is a weeping matter, a heavy matter, under the pretence for gathering for Robin Hood, a Traitor, and a Thief, to put out a preacher. ..."

Robin Hood was nothing but a thief to Latimer, and the peasants doing him honour were still blind with superstition. He himself had walked "in the shadow of death" till he was thirty. Then gentle master Bilney at Cambridge had opened his eyes. Now they saw through the old popish practices, the old Pagan customs. They saw England itself at this moment in its reality. When he walked trying to read his book in the Archbishop of Canterburys garden there was a knocking at the gate. And his man came and said "Sir, there is one that would speak with you". So he shut his book and went out among the poor; into the prisons, into the fields. "The cry of the workmen is come up into my eares" he said. He heard the "poor Labourers, gun makers, Powdermen, Bow makers, arrowmakers, smiths, carpenters soldiers and other crafts" crying that they were unpaid. He found the poor without a goose or a pig for the great were enclosing the fields. He went to the great man and found him still in bed, after his hawking and his hunting, and the hall full of poor suiters waiting to make their plaints. He saw the curates in their velvet shoes and slippers "meet to dance the morris dance". He saw the fine ladies dresses in vardigalls with their hair puffed out in tussocks under French hoods. He saw the young men, no longer shooting with the long bow, as his father had taught him to shoot, but bowling, drinking, whoring. And in the streets of London he saw the harlot going to execution, making merry as she went and crying, "that if good fellows had kept touch with her, she had not bin at this time in that case". He noted the smell of rotting bodies in the churchyard at St Pauls and foretold plague to come. And in every village he found the peasants going on pilgrimages, setting up candles, worshipping pigs bones, and following Robin Hood. How should they know better when there was no preaching in the pulpits, when the words they heard were in a tongue they could not understand?

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So he went about England preaching in English, no matter if he preached on horseback or stood under a tree. + or preaching to the King in person. He did not moderate his words. He spoke to the King himself in a voice that stumbles, that repeats, that loses the thread of its argument—one can almost hear the fist striking the pulpit—no matter, he will bring before the King the real state of England. + He will unveil, show up, speak the truth, even if it brings him to the faggot as it brought his master, the gentle Mr Bilney. "who was for ever visiting prisoners and sick folk". There is only a short pace left him before he too will stand outside the Bocardo at Oxford and feel the flames on his own flesh. So he pours out his anger; So he lights up the state of England + in a voice that stumbles, that uses the plain language of the farm from which he sprang. It is the voice of reason, of humanity, of common sense. There is an urgency in his preaching. It is not a learned voice; it is not a courtly voice; it is the voice of a plain man, whose tearing down superstition, + before he too goes to join Master Bilney at the faggot. And yet for all his urgency, his severity, he is a man of flesh and blood. He cracks his joke. He tells his story. He has a curious sympathy for the human. He is a man of the people, a man of humour, with a love of shooting, with a respect for the gentry.11 But he sees, as the courtier cannot, as the poor cannot, what superstition and ignorance are rife in the land. It is for light and learning that he cries. Give the money, he implores that used to be spent on "pilgrimage matters, in trentalls and masses in purgatory matters" to poor mens sons so that they may become scholars. "There be now none but great mens sons in college". "It will come to pass there we shall have nothing but a little English divinity, that will bring the realm into a very barbarousness, and utter decay of learning". And while the peasants are starving, and continuing their gross superstitions, he sees everywhere the great houses rising. "All the affection of men now adays is in building gay and sumptuous houses, it is in setting up and pulling down, and never have they done building".

Both Latimer and Harrison the preacher and the chronicler, saw the great house rising on the ruins of [the] old. Each in his own way denounced its luxury, its immorality. There today, standing in its green island of park, separated often from the high road only by a dip in the ground and a low red wall[, it] dwarfs its [neighbors]. It looks incongruous, standing among the bungalows and the shops. With its conglomeration of chimneys chapels roofs it looks out of proportion, stranded, derelict. Inside all is kept as if Queen Elizabeth were still expected. The up right Elizabethan chairs stand round the walls. Their fringes and tapestries are not much faded. The great oak tables are heavy and polished. The carved cupboards and chests look brand new. Cut glass chandeliers hang down from the decorated plaster work on the ceiling. Even the knick knacks have survived—; the inlaid work box, the pear shaped lute on which the Queen once played. The furniture remains; stiff, ornate, angular and uncushioned. There are the very "vardigalls" that raised the preachers wrath.

Elizabethan clothes have had too much attention from the historical novelist, and too little from the psychologist.12 What desire was it that prompted this extraordinary display? There must have been some protest, some desire to affirm Page 685 →something, behind the slashed cloaks; the stiff ruffs; the wrought chains and the loops of pearls. The cost was great; the discomfort appalling; yet the fashion prevailed. Was it perhaps, the mark of an anonymous, unrecorded age to enforce the individual; to make ones physical body as bright, as definite, as marked as possible? Fame must be concentrated in the body; since the other kind of fame, the publicity of the paper, of the photograph, was denied them. Did the eloquence of dress speak, when the art of verbal speech was still unformed?

The Elizabethans are silent. There is no little language nothing brief, intimate, colloquial. When they write the rhythm of the Bible is in their ears. It makes their speech unfamiliar. It is only expressive of certain emotions. Thus when Lady Ann Bacon writes to her son she is a preacher addressing a subordinate.13 Fear of God and distrust of man surround her as with the walls of a dungeon. She admonishes; she exhorts. The actual object—it is a basket of strawberries is approached circuitously ceremoniously. Greek and Latin come as easily to her pen as a French phrase comes to ours. They [wrap themselves] about in a cumbrous garment when they [try] to talk. Then again we cannot hear the rough English voice that they heard at the back door. the voice of the mummer and the minstrel. Nor can we see the paths that led to the well and the tree. Robin Hood is gone with all his merry men. The gay and sumptuous house full of oaths and coarseness and also of learning, of courtesy, is silent; a house full of furniture and finery but without inhabitants.14 Bright contrasted colours meet on their faces; scarlet and snow; ebony and gold; but there is no natural connection, no common complexion.15

The writer, who is distinct from the minstrel, whose words are printed in a book with his name to it, must be a poet. For when familiar letters are written in Biblical prose, there is a limit to what can be put into words. There is a barrier between the sayable and the unsayable. If he cannot talk, he must sing. But though at the beginning of the sixteenth century the printing press has given the poet a name, he is still unspecialised. He is not wholly writer, wholly musician or wholly painter.16 It seems possible that the great English art may not be the art of words. He sees acutely what is before him without the shadow of reflection: his ear is stimulated by the sound of words spoken aloud. He must make words sonorous, rhythm obvious. since they are to be read out in company. "I spent most of my time" wrote Lady Ann Clifford "in playing at Glecko and hearing Moll Neville read the Arcadia . . . Rivers used to read to me in Montaignes Essays and Moll Neville in the Faery Queen". Further, words must move easily to the lilt of the singing voice, to the sound of lute and virginals. The English sang their songs then, or played them. When London was burning Pepys noted that "hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house in it, but there was a pair of virginals in it".17 Music moved beneath the words. No grammar bound them tightly together. They could be read aloud; danced to or sung to; but they could not follow the pace of the speaking voice. They could not enter into the private world.

Spenser then—"a little man with short hair, a small band and cuffs"18 standing on the threshold of the "gay and sumptuous house" at Penshurst was Page 686 →separate from the minstrel; from the chronicler; and from his audience.19 They no longer joined in the song and added their own verses to the poem. But the book that had given him a separate existence had brought into being a little group of readers. It had to find its way into the great room where the gentry sat at leisure when they had hunted and hawked and done the business of their estates. That audience at once began to exert its pressure.20 What is the book that will please my patron Sir Philip Sidney? What is the theme that will recommend itself to the Queen? Whom must I praise, whom may I satirise? At once come into existence some of those innumerable influences that are to tug, to distort, to thwart; as also they are to stimulate and draw out. The poet is no longer a nameless wandering voice, but attached to his audience. tethered to one spot and played upon by outside influences. Some are visible to himself only; others show themselves only when time has past. As the book goes out into a larger, a more varied audience these influences become more and more complex. According to its wealth, its poverty, its education, its ignorance, the public demands what satisfies its own need—poetry, history, instruction, a story to make them forget + their own drab lives. The thing that the writer has to say becomes increasingly cumbered. It is only to be discovered in a flash of recognition—Thus some say that their beards bristle when they come upon it; others that a thrill runs down the nerves of the thigh. To disengage the song from the effect of the audience becomes as time goes on a task for the critic—that specially equipped taster who was not yet in existence when the Faery Queen emerged from the depths of anonymity.

Those depths, those long years of anonymous minstrelsy, folk song, legend and words that had no name attached to them, lay behind him. Their confusion pressed upon him. He was conscious of them. "For why a Gods name" he exclaimed "may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language . . ."?21 He was word conscious; an artist; aware of his medium; that words are not paint, nor music; but have their possibilities; their limitations. To be thus aware the writer must have a past behind him. To Spenser the golden age was Chaucers. "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled ..." He trusted that "the infusion sweet Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive" might help him. He looks back to Chaucer; he descends from Chaucer. It was Chaucer who gave him the standard by which to measure his own words. But where the modem writer attacks the actual work of some one of the generation that has just gone, making that book the starting point in another direction, Spensers revolt was against no particular writer—who was there writing English except Chaucer?—but against language itself, its decay, since Chaucer, its corruption. Perhaps Chaucers crudity served as an antidote to his own facility. Perhaps too he used the crabbed old words, not as we now might revert to them to rub sharp what much use has worn smooth; but to restrain what was to come. He was, as we cannot be, aware of the future. Everywhere, in ballads, in talk at the tavern, at the back door, he must have heard something rising, bursting up, from beneath. Was it partly to restrain the coming insurrection that he looked back to the Canterbury Pilgrims?22

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As so often happens, it was the attraction of what is opposed that drew Spenser to Chaucer. For there is that connection between the Faery Queen and the Canterbury Tales but no other. The one is dear sharp definite; the other sensuous, sinuous, dallying. The one is direct, about this real man, this real woman, here and now. the other wanders through time which is neither past nor present, through lands that are neither known nor unknown. Unlike Malory, he has ceased to believe in giants. The faith that the nobles had in 1470 in the real existence of Arthur has turned to sceptidsm. His poem lacks some reality that Malory achieved unthinkingly. Malory too was behind him. Where Malory sees directly Spenser sees at a distance. He sees Knights and ladies with regret, with desire, but not with belief. There is no sharpness in his figures; no edge; no anguish; no sin;+ On the other hand he shows us as Malory cannot the world surrounding them. He realises time and change. And looking back, from a distance he sees them pictorially; grouped, like the figures in a fresco, with the flowers growing at their feet, behind them marble pillars, trees with bright birds, and the libbard and the lion roaming or couchant. There is no tension; no direction; but always movement, as the metre flings its curve of sound, to break, like a wave on the same place, and like a wave to withdraw, to fill again. Folded in this incantation we drowse and sleep; yet always see through the waters, something irradiated.23

Spenser standing on the threshold of the great house is half in shadow, half in light, Half is still unrealised for he cannot confine emotions within himself. He must symbolise, exteriorise. Jealousy is not a passion to issue on actual lips. He must float it outwards; make it abstract; give it a symbolical shape. He cannot speak through the mouths of individuals. The body containing within itself all the passions is still sunk in shadow. But the other half of him is in the light. He is aware of his art as Chaucer was not, nor Langland, nor Malory. His is no longer a wandering voice, but the voice of a man practising an art, asking for recognition, and bitterly conscious of his relation [to] the world, of the worlds scorn.

Had the poet remained in the great room, proferring his book to the little group of readers, English poetry might have remained book poetry, read aloud; a recollection; a reflection; something heard by the leisured listening in the great room. But there was the other voice; the voice at the back door. Spencer had heard it. He recalled the voice of "minstrels making goodly merriment, With wanton bards and rhymers impudent". He had been, it Is said, at the pageant at Kenilworth when, to amuse the Queen, an old story was staged. He had seen "the player dressed in green", +—the old play that the peasants acted when spring came and to placate the earth, the mummer hung himself with green leaves.24

But English was coming to court. Like other great people the Queen must have her diversion.25 Whenever the Queen went to the great house, the minstrels acted before her in English. Ironically enough, the preacher who was for banishing Robin Hood had himself forged the very weapon that gave the old minstrels a new lease of life. When Latimer said the Lords prayer in English at Page 688 →the beginning and end of his sermons he was putting English into high places. He was rescuing it from the back door. He was teaching the nobles and the peasants to respect their mother tongue. He was making it possible for the gentry and the commons to sit together in one house listening to a play.

For the wandering minstrels, driven from the Church, now taking up their pitch in the market place or in the yard of an Inn had by 1576 somehow possessed themselves of a house.26 It was a shadowy [. . .] lodging: at first; but by 1591 the playhouse in Southwark needed rebuilding. Planks and nails and hinges and timber were brought to the Rose. Carpenters and painters were hired. and the sums spent on the rebuilding were entered at last by Henslowe in his vellum covered book. It was a wooden house, part open to the air, part thatched. It stood in Southwark, next [to] the Barge the Bell and the Cock "recognised stews". The contrast between town and country, judging by Nordens map, was sharp.27 There, in one fretted mass of spires and little streets, lay the City. But grass fields rose behind it. From Southwark there was a view of open country. Fields and hills came close down to the stews on the Bankside. And the Bankside was infested with hogs.

The house according to Dr. Greg, could hold three thousand people. Most paid one penny to stand in the open; twopence secured a seat; sixpence was the price of a seat under cover. The audience came flocking across the river. For what other amusement was there, a contemporary asked, of an afternoon for the "number of captains and soldiers about London"?28 Only the amusements that the preachers so furiously denounced; carding, dicing, gaming, the following of harlots and drink. The common people came+ over the river from the crowded festering little streets round St Pauls, where the dead bodies smelt so strong. They came in defiance of peachers & magistrates. They came in such numbers that the watermen lived on their fares. The flag flew; the trumpets sounded, and at about half past two in the afternoon, the audience crowded into the playhouse. In cloud or in sun shine they saw the actors issue from the doors, richly dressed in the taffetas and tinsels, in the satin doublets and hose laid thick with gold lace that Henslowe entered in his book, or, according to one spectator, dressed in the cast off robes of the nobles sold by their servants. They were splendidly dressed. But there was no scenery. The sun beat or the rain poured upon the common people standing in the yard. Then the King spoke:

Brother Cosroe, I find myself aggrieved,

Yet insufficient to express the same;

For it requireth a great and thundering speech.29

At last one man speaks in his own person. The wandering voices are collected, embodied. There is no abstraction any longer. All is visible, audible tangible in the light of the present moment. The world takes shape behind him. Egypt and Libya and Persia and Greece rise up. Kings and Emperors stride forth. Like great moths shaking their wings still damp and creased they unfurl the great sentences, the absurd hyperboles.

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The spring is withered by your smothering host,

For neither rain can fall upon the earth

Nor sun reflex his virtuous beams thereon,

The ground is mantled with such multitudes.

The utmost stretch of words can scarcely give body to this vast universe that is struggling into being. Words mount; pile on top of each other; over balance and tumble. Great names clash their cymbals. If, blown on by this pressure, the poet veers aside

So poets say my lord

And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet

he is urged on. There is no pause, no shade. Armies trample; horses neigh; Battles are fought. Blood flows. Over all the Gods are seated on their thrones. The Gods will exact tribute. Meanwhile let us boast:

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planets course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest . . .

Then suddenly the triumph parts asunder; the poet changes his tune

What is beauty, saith my sufferings then?

If all the pens that ever poets held,

Had fed the feelings of their masters thoughts . . .

If these had made one poems period,

And all combined in beautys worthiness

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest.

There is a jolt at the points. Lovely as the words are, the mind slides on to another rail. To speak them the poet has separated himself from the actors. He cannot yet make Tamburlaine speak those words with his own lips. The play is still in part the work of the undifferentiated audience, demanding great names, great deeds, simple outlines, and not the single subtlety of one soul.30

The audience is silent. If we try to look at the audience off the stage in their private lives we see only wisps, passing phantoms. + There are the Fytton sisters, daughters of Sir Edward Fytton, knight of Gawsworth in Cheshire. Mary, the younger, became one of Elizabeths Maids of Honour.31 She goes from her country home to the great world. Sir William Knollys, a person of great consequence there, promised her father that he will not fail "to fulfill your desire in playing the Good shepherd and will to my power defend the innocent lamb from Page 690 →the wolvish cruelty and foxlike subtlety of the tame beasts of this place. . . ."His words weave a veil through which nothing is seen in its actual shape. + Silence falls. Then in involved metaphors, making use of the old images, speaking circumlocuitously of spring and summer and winter frost and flowers in a fair garden he reveals obliquely his illicit passion for the girl. Silence again descends. Then "one Mrs Martin who dwelt at the Chopping Knife near Ludgate" gossips that the young Maid of Honour has dressed up as a man in a large white cloak and gone to meet her lover, Lord Pembroke privately. Silence descends. Then we learn Mary has borne him a bastard, whom he refuses to acknowledge: And her father conveys her home. Silence again descends. It is broken later when some further intrigue makes her mother cry: "If it had pleased God when I did bear her that she and I had been buried it had saved me from a great deal of sorrow and grief and her from . . . such shame as never had Cheshire woman. . . . Write no more to me of her". But her passion, her disgrace, her humiliation are all acted in dumb show. They are hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. Even a plain country squire once he takes pen in hand has recourse to poetry. Mr Beaumont, after trying to explain "My conceit of this triple love, of affection passion and conjunction" has recourse to poetry. He quotes Spenser to help him out. It is the poets still who speak for the squires. They have no serviceable language. Yet behind these florid decorations the wolves of the court pry prey and raven. Bastards are bom. Reputations are ruined. There is something gross behind the flowers. Only the people themselves pass unseen. They too like the dramatists remain anonymous.32

And the play itself was still anonymous. The lack of Marlowes name, or of Kyds, shows how largely the play was a common product, written by one hand, but so moulded in transition that the author had no sense of property in it. It was in part the work of the audience. And the audience was a large one. Fifteen hundred people, Dr Greg computes was an average attendance, Of these the greater part were apprentices, citizens, soldiers, the common people seeking relief from the boredom of the afternoon. Their presence is obvious enough in the early plays. It is they who draw up the extravagance the hyperbole, as a sheet of paper draws up the fire. It was they who made the playwright capable of his great strides, of vast audacities beyond the reach of the solitary writer with his mind fixed upon the reader in the great room. If we could measure the effect of the audience upon the play we should have a hold which is denied us upon the play itself. But the audience, drawn though it is by an irresistable attraction to the play, is silent.

That silence is one of the deep gulfs that lies between us and the play. They come crowding across the river daily; but they sit there silent. They neither praise nor blame. We can compare this silence with our own silence at the Russian ballet or at the cinema in their early days. A new art comes upon us so surprisingly that we sit silent, recognising before we take the measure. But, while we have a measuring rod handy, our past[, and] a press that at once applies a standard, the Elizabethans had no literature behind them with which to compare the play, and no press to give it speech. To the Elizabethans the expressive Page 691 →power of words after their long inadequacy must have been overwhelming. Surprise must have kept them silent. There at the Globe or at the Rose men and women whose only reading had been the Bible or some old chronicle came out into the light of the present moment. They saw themselves splendidly dressed. They heard themselves saying out loud what they had never said yet. They heard their aspirations, their profanities, their ribaldries spoken for them in poetry. And there was something illicit in their pleasure. The preacher and the magistrate were always denouncing their emotion. That too must have given it intensity.

The play then owes its hyperbole to the audience in the penny seats. At their command it is violent; it is coarse; it is, like our own detective stories and best sellers a parody and a transformation of actual fact. It must have [been] a great temptation for the playwright to feed the desire of the audience in the penny seats. But in the seats in the covered part of the house there were nobles, rulers scholars. Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland, Rowland White wrote to Sir Robert Sidney "pass away their time in London, merely in going to plays every day". Yet they are silent too. A young poet dedicates his sonnets to Mr W.H. and none of them troubles to ask, Who is this patron? It is not a matter of interest in court circles. And this lack of curiosity is harder to explain. For they were readers; they had the Greeks and the Latins at the back of their minds. How can it have been that they said nothing about this astonishing new art, that they did not express that sense of outrage, of partisanship which seems to be the common reaction of the more cultivated part of the public when a new writer of genius appears? Perhaps Bacon in his Essays supplies a reason. "These things be but Toyes" he wrote in the essay called "Of Masques and Triumphs". To the aristocratic scholar the players were still only mountebanks, bear leaders and acrobats. They spoke in the vulgar tongue. Off the stage they lived in the heart of darkness. Marlowe lying on the bed at Deptford reached out and stabbed Ingram in the head; whereupon Ingram gave Marlowe a mortal wound over the right eye.33 Ben Johnson ran Gabriel Spenser through the body with a sword that cost three and sixpence. Kempe, one of the actors, went dancing to Norwich.34 If Tennyson had run Browning thru the body, or Sir Hen[ry] Irving had skipped over the steps in dancing shoes no doubt Vn [Victorian] society wd. have kept them at a distance. So complete was Bacons contempt for this underworld that he could be tolerant. "The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of Man. . . . great spirits and great businesse do keep out of this weak passion." The proper place for the weak passion was the stage, for love "leads to speaking in a perpetual hyperbole".

The proper topics of discussion in the upper world was not the Play at the Bankside. The titles of the Essays enumerate the proper topics. "Of Truth. Of Death. Of Unity in religion. Of Revenge. Of Simulation and Dissimulation." These were the subjects that the rulers discussed at their high tables; and the play was a diversion with which to relax the mind after serious work. The sediment of that conversation is to be found in the rich deposits of the essays. He is concerned with the great world of action; with government; with the tortuous Page 692 →natures of Princes; with the arts by which Princes can sway, can coax, can suppress. He lives entirely in the world of great spirits and great business. The common people is contemptible. "The master of supersition is the people". Praise, "if it be from the common people, it is commonly false and naught. The lowest virtues draw praise from them; the middle virtues work in them astonish ment; and admiration; but of the highest vertues they have no sense or perceiving at all".

The soul that walked between delicate groves, now and then formulating a phrase to be taken down by the young secretary Thomas Hobbes, kept to a narrow path between hedges. While Montaigne ranged the world, indulging all curiosities, mixing garrulously with every one, Bacon kept to the narrow path. Yet even in the shade his thought is embodied. His deep meditations are given concrete form. "Nay retire men cannot when they would: neither will they when it were reason; but are impatient of privateness even in age and sickness which require the Shadow: Like old Townmen that will still be sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer Age to scorn". Even in the green shade thought is coloured. "The Colours that show best by candlelight, are: White, Carnation, and a kinde of Sea-Water Green". It only needs one poet for these thoughts to become people.

Bacons contempt was for hyperbole; not the for the art of speech. He was teaching the ranting players to speak slowly, closely, subtly. He was proving that there is another kind of poetry, the poetry of prose. He was bringing the prose of the mind into being. And thus by increasing the range of the poet, by making it possible for him to express more, he was making an end of anonymity.35

Anonymity was a great possession. It gave the early writing an impersonality, a generality. It gave us the ballads; it gave us the songs. It allowed us to know nothing of the writer: and so to concentrate upon his song. Anon had great privileges. He was not responsible. He was not self conscious. He is not self conscious. He can borrow. He can repeat. He can say what every one feels. No one tries to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience, in his work. He keeps at a distance from the present moment. Anon the lyric poet repeats over and over again that flowers fade; that death is the end. He is never tired of celebrating red roses and white breasts. The anonymous playwright has like the singer this nameless vitality, something drawn from the crowd in the penny seats and not yet dead in ourselves. We can still become anonymous and forget something that we have learnt when we read the plays to which no one has troubled to set a name.

But at some point there comes a break when anonymity withdraws. Does it come when the playwright had absorbed the contribution of the audience; and can return to them their own general life individualised in single and separate figures? There comes a point when the audience is no longer master of the playwright. Yet he is not separate from them. A common life still unites them; but there are moments of separation. Now we say, he is speaking our own thoughts. Now he is our selves. But this sense of individuality comes fitfully. The beauty which is so astonishingly revealed, is often a suspended derelict irrelevant Page 693 →beauty. There is no sequence. It does not connect; the parts are severed, and something runs to waste. For the anonymous playwright is irresponsible. He flouts truth at the bidding of the audience. he cares only for the plot. We are left in the end without an end. The emotion is wasted.

But gradually the audience is mastered by the playwright. The mist withdraws. So many dramatists are exploring tunnels that lead at last to some common discovery. So many private people are pressing their weight of unexpressed emotion upon the writers consciousness. Country squires are learning to speak what they feel without quoting Spenser. The curtain rises upon play after play. Each time it rises upon a more detached, a more matured drama. The individual on the stage becomes more and more differentiated; and the whole group is more closely related and less at the mercy of the plot. The curtain rises upon Henry the Sixth; and King John; upon Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra and upon Macbeth. Finally it rises upon the Tempest. But the play has outgrown the uncovered theatre where the sun beats and the rain pours. That theatre must be replaced by the theatre of the brain. The playwright is replaced by the man who writes a book. The audience is replaced by the reader. Anon is dead.36

" 'Anon' and 'The Reader' " 382-424.

NOTES

The essay that Woolf entitled "Anon" in every version of the manuscript and typescript was left unfinished at the time of her death. The transcript of the essay included here consists of a more or less clear text of the last version of the essay, based on typescripts that include Woolf's manuscript corrections; when clear, these corrections have been silently incorporated into the text. The + signifies an incomplete clause that Woolf included in a subsequent sentence. Typographical errors have been corrected, and ellipses and quotations marks have been printed in conformity with Woolf's published writing. Punctuation, paragraphs, spelling, capitalization, and repetitions, however, have been left exactly as they appear in the original, reminding the reader that the essay was still very much a rough draft. Woolf would certainly have revised it before publication, perhaps including some of the material found in the earlier versions. In the notes I have identified Woolf's citations and added some passages from earlier drafts that amplify her thoughts. For a history of the different versions, textual variants, a textual apparatus, and further information about Woolf's sources and reading, see "A & R." But even that is incomplete; readers interested in experiencing Woolf's essay in full should consult the original manuscripts and typescripts.

  1. 1. The historian who provided this introduction, as well as a similar passage in Between the Acts (218), was G. M. Trevelyan (3), whose History of England Woolf was reading while planning her work. Trevelyan was also the source of her diatribe against "insider" history: Diary 5:333.
  2. 2. The first two paragraphs of this version of "Anon" are a drastic reduction of the original opening. The most significant difference in the original is that the description of Anon's desire to sing leads immediately to Anon's death: Page 694 →

    Anon died round about 147[8]<7>. It was the printed book with the authors name attached that killed him. After that the audience was separate from the singer. After that the song was attached to the singer. Anon gives place to Geoffrey or John or Peter; ne lives in a house; and ne has books.

    The heart of this vast proliferation of printed pages remains the song. The song has the same power over the reader in the 20th century as over the hearer in the 11th. To enjoy singing, to enjoy hearing the song, must be the most deep rooted, the toughest of human instincts comparable for persistency with the instinct of self preservation. It is indeed the instinct of self preservation. Only when we put two and two together—two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks <notes> do we overcome dissolution and set up some stake against oblivion. The passion with which we seek out these creations and attempt endlessly, perpetually, to make them is of a piece with the instinct that sets us preserving our bodies, with clothes, food, roofs, from destruction.

    But the printing press brought into existence forces that cover over the original song—books themselves, and the readers of books. If science were so advanced that we could at this moment X ray the singers mind we should find a nimbus surrounding the song; a stream of influences. Some we can name—education; class; the pressure of society. But they are so many, and so interwoven and so obscure that it is simpler to invent for them nonsense names—say Nin Crot and Pully. Nin Crot and Pully are always at their work, tugging, obscuring, distorting. Some are visible only to the writer. Others only to the reader. More and more complex do they become as time passes. The song beneath is only to be discovered in a flash of recognition; Some say they feel it when their beards bristle; others that a thrill runs down the nerves of the thigh. But the song is there still.

    The original opening also includes a description of one modern but vastly different embodiment of Anon: "Anon is only a voice. He has his representative today, When some procession passes, a hand will thrust a broadsheet on you in Cheapside. But you can see the author. Most often anonymity is used to conceal something on purpose from the audience. But the old Anon was not hiding for that reason."

  3. 3. In earlier descriptions of Anon's language and social status, Woolf had written, " 'English/says the historian, 'had gone underground for two centuries . . .' " Woolf's source may have been Chambers, "Some Aspects of Medieval Lyric," or Trevelyan, who wrote that after the Conquest, "the Anglo-Saxon tongue . . . was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasants' jargon, the talk of ignorant serfs. . . . There is no more romantic episode in the history of man than this underground growth and unconscious self-preparation of the despised island patois . . ." (131-132).
  4. 4. Most of the details in this and the next paragraph are taken from Chambers, The Medieval Stage.
  5. 5. For the Pastons, old friends of Woolf's, see The Paston Letters; Thomas Betson and Thomas Paycocke are the subjects of chapters in Power, Medieval People.
  6. 6. Earlier drafts of this passage suggest more explicitly the connection between the scars on the land and the scars in the mind, both of which link us to the past:

    Could we see [the great Elizabethan house] as it is said that the airman sees a village <field> from the air with the scars of other villages <old roads> and other houses on it. we should see the great house connected with the village . . . . But there was also the other connection—the common belief. That bond between the great house and the small has faded, till it is like one of those perhaps rather greener rides still to be found in England along which, antiquaries say the Pilgrims rode to Canterbury. So the scholars tell us of the roads now faded in the mind.

  7. Page 695 →7. In earlier versions Woolf notes that "the desire to enact was coupled with the other desire—to make something useless; something unconnected with the daily struggle. to bring out into the day light embodied their own natural love of play."
  8. 8. Early drafts of this section contain a paragraph describing in great detail one aspect of the common belief shared by noble and peasant: superstition and a belief in witchcraft.
  9. 9. Woolf has misquoted here; the phrase "found his bed" should read "found her bed."
  10. 10. Woolf's source for this section was Harrison's Description of England in Shakspere's Youth. In other drafts, Harrison, described as a "representative man," provides a self-portrait of the new writer, his social position, and his audience:

    Even now when words are printed the great public is not the reader, or the paymaster. Written words must please a single man in the first place, and the Harrison's volume is ceremoniously tended tendered to a Lord Cobham in words as ornate as the carvings and decorations that shocked him in the fashionable Elizabethan house.

  11. 11. He begins to sound like Rev. Streatfield in Between the Acts (190-191).
  12. 12. The section on Elizabethan clothes was added late in the writing of the essay.
  13. 13. Earlier versions of the section on Lady Ann are fuller, emphasizing more her violence and suspicions and citing several passages from her letters to her sons, Anthony and Francis. One draft of this section includes a note to compare Lady Ann's letters to Madame de Sévigné's.
  14. 14. This sentence is all that remains of an elaborate metaphor comparing the Elizabethan house to a "convoluted iridescent shell," polished on the outside but silent and empty of human life within. Woolf made a trip to Penshurst, once the home of Sir Philip Sidney, on June 14, 1940, the day Paris fell (Diary 5:296-297).
  15. 15. Earlier versions are more explicit about the influence of the Bible on Elizabethan prose: "They can say nothing simple, nothing intimate. They are never subtle; they are never shaded."
  16. 16. This paragraph is the residue of one of the earliest ideas for "Anon": the interrelationship of the arts and the importance of the eye and the ear on early writers. In one version, this section concludes by evoking Anon and the Elizabethan play as the reason why the Elizabethan artist turned toward poetry rather than music or painting.
  17. 17. On January 1, 1941, Woolf wrote in her diary, "On Sunday night, as I was reading about the Great fire, in a very accurate detailed book, London was burning"; this book was almost certainly Pepys's Diaries.
  18. 18. Woolf found this description of Spenser in Collier, "The Life of Edmund Spenser," Works I:clv.
  19. 19. In an earlier attempt to define what made Spenser the first artist, Woolf wrote: "The artist—the person who stands outside, by some impulse desiring to observe and state <rather than to take part—>."
  20. 20. In one version, Woolf is more explicit, and more bitter, about the negative effects of both the printing press—"not a nice feeder"—and the public it created on Anon: "Only a few [writers] still persist in making words into works of art."
  21. 21. Letter to Gabriel Harvey, in Works I:clviii.
  22. 22. Earlier versions make the coming insurrection more explicitly linguistic.
  23. 23. In an earlier version Woolf noted, "It is the thing itself; it is the original design, from which Tennyson and Morris made their copies."
  24. 24. See The Fairie Queene, "Mutabilitie Cantos," vii.35.
  25. 25. An alternate version on the same page reads: "The Queen must have her minstrels."
  26. Page 696 →26. Most of the details about the Elizabethan playhouse and audience are found in Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg; Harrison, Elizabethan Plays and Players; and Evans.
  27. 27. John Norden's map of London (1593) appears both in Harrison's Description of England, where it is annotated, and in Harrison, Elizabethan Plays and Players.
  28. 28. Thomas Nashe, Piers Penniless (1592); quoted in Harrison, Elizabethan Plays and Players 100.
  29. 29. This and the following quotations are taken from Marlowe, Tamberlaine the Great, part I.
  30. 30. Earlier drafts of this passage emphasize more the distinction between the dramatist who wrote those startling lines of poetry and the anonymous playmaker who "lacks the little language to put on Kings lips" and who is still inspired by the "common voice" of the audience.
  31. 31. Mary Fytton, the mistress of William Herbert, Lord Pembroke, was at one time thought to be a possible model for the dark lady of the sonnets. The letters and documents that tell the story recorded here appear in Newdigate-Newdegate.
  32. 32. The original version of the Fytton section concludes with several reflections about the lack of a critical sense in the Elizabethan audience:

    Thus the early works of Shakespeare make no ripple in the pool of silence. No one protests that here is an upstart writer who is for throwing society into the melting pot. The great might be mocked—that was the ancient privilege of the court jester; or some scene from history re enacted. But the censor was quick to control irreverence. And in fact the dramatist was not destroying society. The indignation that, after the first silent surprise, that Ibsen tor example stirred in London was partly the rage of those wno felt that venerable institutions were being criticised. But the public at the Globe and the Rose could not feel as the public in the 19th century felt when Ghosts was acted that old humbugs were being shown up; and the rottenness of society. After all, when country squires must call in Spenser to express their meaning, prose was not yet serviceable; the critical spirit had no proper tool.

  33. 33. Woolf found the details of Marlowe's death in two works by Harrison: Elizabethan Plays and Players 124 and An Elizabethan Journal 243.
  34. 34. The story of Gabriel Spenser's death is told both by Harrison, Elizabethan Plays and Players 188-189, and by Greg, Henslowe's Diary II, 313. The story of Will Kempe's dance from London to Norwich is told by Harrison 225-227.
  35. 35. The effect of Bacon's criticisms, gravity, and prose on the play is explored in more detail in earlier versions of the Bacon sectton.
  36. 36. There are four different endings to "Anon," all of them heavily revised. What appears to be the first draft concludes:

    But anonymity is a great possession. . . . Nor is anon dead in ourselves. The crude early dramas still have the power to make us ask—as the audience asked—the childs question: what comes next? <a power denied to [Wordsworth] Coleridge Tennyson.>

    It is only later when the pressure of silent hoarded emotion had thrown up words, as the fingers of the man at the monotype machine cast letters from the bubbling lead, that we lost this general Quality to gain—everything it seems. For the curtain goes on rising incessantly for fifty years. Now it rises on Henry the Fifth. . . . The stage has become too small to act this drama. Perhaps after centuries, the play will come to birth again, differently, in the Magic Flute, in Fidelio. But the play never again fitted the stage completely in England. The book after Shakespeare takes the place of the play. And Anon is dead for ever.

Page 697 →

The Reader

The great house that Latimer deplored becomes solid and entire in the pages of Lady Anne Cliffords diary.1 From her childhood she was tenacious of her hereditary rights—her father had the right to carry the Kings sword "and so it lineally descended to me". All her youth she fought, against kinsmen, husband and the king himself for her right to inherit the lands in Westmoreland. "... I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever" she told him. When the lands and the five castles were hers, she instantly began rebuilding; Not only the land was hers, but diamond buttons, rubies, fur cloaks. + As if to solidify her possessions she wrote out inventories of them. Family love is in part the desire to hand on her property. She sends for her grandchildren in order that they may taste the delight of possession and so refresh her own satisfaction. The sense of the body permeates her pages. All movements become spectacular. Crowds attend her. Six bay horses drag the coach. The coach is lined with green cloth, and laced with green and black silk lace. She is for ever asserting her identity. She has her initials carved even over farm house walls. This is her property; this land is hers by right. Certain flesh and blood—that of the Stanleys, the Russells, the Cliffords, the Herberts and above all of the Cliffords has become like a precious stone not to be mixed with baser metal. When Lord Sheffield marries Anne Erwin it was "held a very mean match, and indiscreet on part of him." She believes in the immortality of the body as firmly as in the immortality of the soul.

Yet there were moments when even this carapace of possessions proved too heavy for her. "If I had not excellent Chaucer's book here to comfort me, I were in a pitiable case, having so many troubles as I have here, but when I read in that, I scorn and make light of them all, and a little part of his beauteous spirit infuses itself in me." She adds that postscript to a letter about a little cabinet and cup which she had left with Lady Kent when she borrowed a hundred pounds of her.

But it is only when she reads that she comments. When she goes to the play she says only "Supped with my Lord and Lady Arundel and after supper I saw the play of the Mad Lover . . ."or "We stood to see the Masque in the box with my Lady Ruthven." It was when the playhouses were shut presumably that the reader was bom. The curious faculty of making houses and countries visible, and men and women and their emotions, from marks on a printed page was undeveloped + so long as the play was dominant. The audience at the play house had to draw in the play with their eyes and ears. Without a book of the words they could not deepen and revise the impression left by the play, or ask those questions that are debated now in every newspaper. The lack of general reading accounts for the long pause between Shakespeares death and the 18th century when the plays of Shakespeare hung suspended, unrealised—even in 17 Morgann could say that Shakespeare still lacked half his proper fame.2 The Page 698 →lack of a reading public accounts too for the scarcity of criticism and for the general nature of what criticism there is. Both Sidney and Jonson are writing for the small critical public, and thus deal with general questions, and not with particular books and persons.

The reader then comes into existence sometime at the end of the sixteenth century, and his life history could we discover it would be worth writing, for the effect it had upon literature. At some point his ear must have lost its acuteness; at another his eye must have become dull. Our own attempt when we read the early Elizabethan plays [to] supply the trumpets and the flags, the citizens and the apprentices is an effort to revert to an earlier stage. As time goes on the reader becomes distinct from the spectator. His sense of words and their associations develops. A word spelt in the old spelling brings in associations. + As the habit of reading becomes universal, readers split off into different classes. There is the specialised reader, who attaches himself to certain aspects of the printed words. Again there is the very large class of perfectly literate people who strip many miles of print yearly from paper yet never read a word. Finally there is the reader who, like Lady Anne Clifford read excellent Chaucers book when they are in trouble, "and a little part of his beauteous spirit infuses itself in me." And the curious faculty—the power to make places and houses, men and women and their thoughts and emotions visible on the printed page is always changing. The cinema is now developing his eyes; the Broadcast is developing his ear. His importance can be gauged by the fact that when his attention is distracted, in times of public crisis, the writer exclaims: I can write no more.

But the presence of the reader was felt even while the play was still on the stage. It was for him that Burton composed that extraordinary composition the Anatomy of Melancholy. It is there that the reader makes his first appearance, for it is there that we find the writer completely conscious of his relation with the reader. and He reveals himself. I am a bachelor. I am neither rich nor poor. I am a tumbler over of other mens books. I live in college rooms. I am a spectator not an actor. There is no playhouse audience forcing him to embody his meditations. The vast accumulations, of learning, that have filtered from books into the quiet college room meander over the page. He sees through a thousand green shades what lies immediately before him—the unhappy heart of man. The reflections serve to chequer the immediate spectacle. From books he has won the tolerant sense that we are not single figures but innumerably repeated. In pursuit of melancholy he travels over the whole world, though he has never left his college room. We are at a remove from the thing treated. We are enjoying the spectacle of melancholy, not sharing its anguish.

It is here that we develop faculties that the play left dormant. + Now the reader is completely in being. He can pause; he can ponder; he can compare; he can draw back from the page and see behind it a man sitting alone in the centre of the labyrinth of words in a college room thinking of suicide. He can gratify many different moods. He can read directly what is on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written. There is a long drawn continuity in the book Page 699 →that the play has not. It give a different pace to the mind. We are in a world where nothing is concluded.

Addendum

[While the other versions of the opening of "The Reader" contain much of the material found in the fragment printed above, there are some passages that are worth extracting for their insights into Woolf's attempts to conceptualize the difference between the Elizabethan audience and the modern reader: what was lost, what was gained, the communal nature of the art, the importance of the body of the actor, how we can recapture the sense of the eye and the ear.]

This faculty, the power to make out of print men, countries, places houses & words & bodies, & their thoughts, is rare; It is not existent in great masses of the literate. It is different from the scholars gift or the critics.

But if we cease to consider the plays separately, but scramble them together as one common attempt; then we are able to make them serve as sketches for one masterpiece. And the darkness in which these plays lie helps the endeavour to conceive of that many nameless workers; and many private people were pressing their weight were discharging their emotion into that vast cauldron of seething matter which at last Shakespeare struck out into his plays.

We have lost the sound of the spoken word; all that the sight of the actors bodies suggests to the mind through the eye. We have lost the sense of being part of the audience. We miss a thousand suggestions that the dramatist conveyed by the inflection of voice, by gesture, by the placing of the actors bodies. This can still be proved by comparing our impression after seeing the play acted with our impression after reading the play alone. But as the actor imports much that is of his own day, and foreign to the past, so that there is still something in every Elizabethan play sunk beyond recall.

Presumably the earlier plays, in which the playwright and the audience were in closer cooperation, are the more damaged by reading them. The reader instinctively tries to be there in person. He tries to supply the trumpets and the flags; the citizens and the apprentices. He nourishes the inadequate emotion with a dip into Henslowe, with a dip into Holinshed. He labours to supply the sunk part of the play. He is perpetually rebuffed. He is apt to become not a reader but a student; a careful collector of old scattered bones. At some point however in Elizabethan drama the reader is bom. When the dramatist becomes conscious of the play as a work of art; when he is able to unite the play by something in himself—his personality, his conception—it is then that, he brings the reader into being.

Letter.

You will complain very justly that this brittle and imperfect sketch with all Page 700 →its exaggerations, foreshortenings gives you nothing of the emotion which is presumably to be found in the books themselves. Here then let us make a transition from one kind of reader to another. In order to divest ourselves of the attitude which—Let us make certain confessions. . . . The first is that the critical attitude pinches the mind. It is no longer fitting. ... it pinches; it compresses; it puts the mind in whalebones, like a stays, or pinches the foot like too tight shoes. Even to copy accurately a quotation breaks the stream of thought. The need of accuracy is again inimical. In short, the critic today is like a in the position of a body which feels the attraction of many magnets at one and the same time. To demagnetise ourselves we have to shut the book; If we can, let us be aware only of the and to seek if we can find it a state of mind that is propitious; that state of mind in which it seems possible to us to write the book, not to read it. In that state of mind full of impressions, uncoordinated, contradictory, in which so many senses seem to take part; and yet one or two gradually become significant. Here we are trying to discover what the source of the sunk impulse. And the hidden spring, the gush of water deep beneath the mud. Whether it holds true universally, or if not, the fi t [sic] instinct is to be . . .

Take a simple instance, the quotation. In order to copy out even one stanza of a play, it is necessary to open at the right page then to copy accurately. This at once breaks the stream of thought. Besides, there is always present the other critic—Let us see him in person—For ever so many years, he has not been later than nine at the Museum. Or, his lectures have been so regular that one cd find him at his place at the reading desk at four every Thursday. There is no need to discuss the effect of that prohibition. If we could evade all this, we should have to sink into a very dusky layer of the mind, to be able to put down the book or the paper & the pen, to free ourselves from all the impositions of authority & the dominion of what is customary.

Let us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion. If number 18 still runs, let us take it, when the owling time is at hand, down to London Bridge. There is a curious smell in this part of the world, of hops, it may be; & also a curious confraternity. A woman going one way hails a man going the other. Here there is no differentiation. The streets are drab enough. The sewer has a great turbulent swollen stream. The cranes are picking sacks from the holds of ships. There is a shiny slab of mud beneath the warehouses; & St Pauls rises. The gulls are swooping; & some small boys paddle in the pebbles. Above the sky is huddled & crowded with purple streamers. We are still thinking of the plays, because it was here that the Globe stood. Now let us give way to the imagination. The roar & the chaos; the grind of wheels; the general diffusion: all soon breed a great desire for statement. Such was one of the elements in the drama. Here is the unwritten poem. In this disorder, this sound the difficulty of keeping away from the statement. A roar, a general incoherence. The pressure of light, & gestures; some Page 701 →singing: an attitude. Leaning over the river, losing ones way in some alley; there rises the curious nameless [desire to express]

It is equally important, to the understanding of the poem, not to read at all, to dip now & again into the [inchoate] & to talk, with many elisions, much left out.

This is particularly true today; when the economic force is cutting the critic into a special form.

For then we revive the reader—a very important person. For the reader was bom when the playhouse closed.

" 'Anon'” and 'The Reader* " 427-435.

NOTES

  1. 1. Descriptions and quotations are found in The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Sackville-West, and Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford.
  2. 2. Possibly Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777).
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