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MR. BENNETT AND
MRS. BROWN

VIRGINIA WOOLF

PUBLISHED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
AT THE HOGARTH PRESS TAVISTOCK SQUARE
LONDON W.C.I

1924




MR. BENNETT AND
MRS. BROWN[1]




It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only
person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to
write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your
invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what
demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose
before me--the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, "My name is
Brown. Catch me if you can."

Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones
comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the
world, "Come and catch me if you can." And so, led on by this
will-o'-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending
the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most
part very little cash in exchange. Few catch the phantom; most have to
be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.

My belief that men and women write novels because they are lured on to
create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them has the
sanction of Mr. Arnold Bennett. In an article from which I will quote he
says: "The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing
else. . . . Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts.
But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of
the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance;
if they are not, oblivion will be its portion. . . ." And he goes on to
draw the conclusion that we have no young novelists of first-rate
importance at the present moment, because they are unable to create
characters that are real, true, and convincing.

These are the questions that I want with greater boldness than
discretion to discuss to-night. I want to make out what we mean when we
talk about "character" in fiction; to say something about the question
of reality which Mr. Bennett raises; and to suggest some reasons why the
younger novelists fail to create characters, if, as Mr. Bennett asserts,
it is true that fail they do. This will lead me, I am well aware, to
make some very sweeping and some very vague assertions. For the question
is an extremely difficult one. Think how little we know about
character--think how little we know about art. But, to make a clearance
before I begin, I will suggest that we range Edwardians and Georgians
into two camps; Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy I will call
the Edwardians; Mr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and
Mr. Eliot I will call the Georgians. And if I speak in the first person,
with intolerable egotism, I will ask you to excuse me. I do not want to
attribute to the world at large the opinions of one solitary,
ill-informed, and misguided individual.

My first assertion is one that I think you will grant--that every one in
this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live
for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and
had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it;
our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can
only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion,
which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about
December 1910 human character changed.

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there
saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change
was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was,
nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the
year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel
Butler, in _The Way of All Flesh_ in particular; the plays of Bernard
Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use
a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian
cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent,
obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and
fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow _The Daily
Herald_, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn
instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the
_Agamemnon_, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are
not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of
the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her,
of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of
genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of
writing books. All human relations have shifted--those between masters
and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human
relations change there is at the same time a change in religion,
conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these
changes about the year 1910.

I have said that people have to acquire a good deal of skill in
character-reading if they are to live a single year of life without
disaster. But it is the art of the young. In middle age and in old age
the art is practised mostly for its uses, and friendships and other
adventures and experiments in the art of reading character are seldom
made. But novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do
not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough
about it for practical purposes. They go a step further; they feel that
there is something permanently interesting in character in itself. When
all the practical business of life has been discharged, there is
something about people which continues to seem to them of overwhelming
importance, in spite of the fact that it has no bearing whatever upon
their happiness, comfort, or income. The study of character becomes to
them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I
find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk
about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every
now and then to embody their view in writing.

So, if you will allow me, instead of analysing and abstracting, I will
tell you a simple story which, however pointless, has the merit of being
true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may
show you what I mean by character in itself; that you may realise the
different aspects it can wear; and the hideous perils that beset you
directly you try to describe it in words.

One night some weeks ago, then, I was late for the train and jumped into
the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange and
uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two
people who were already sitting there. Not that they were young or
happy. Far from it. They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the
man well over forty. They were sitting opposite each other, and the man,
who had been leaning over and talking emphatically to judge by his
attitude and the flush on his face, sat back and became silent. I had
disturbed him, and he was annoyed. The elderly lady, however, whom I
will call Mrs. Brown, seemed rather relieved. She was one of those
clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness--everything
buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up--suggests more
extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about
her--a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was
extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched
the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to
make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a
widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an
only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to
go to the bad. All this shot through my mind as I sat down, being
uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers
unless I have somehow or other accounted for them. Then I looked at the
man. He was no relation of Mrs. Brown's I felt sure; he was of a bigger,
burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very
likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue
serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief, and a stout leather
bag. Obviously, however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with
Mrs. Brown; a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not
intend to discuss in my presence.

"Yes, the Crofts have had very bad luck with their servants," Mr. Smith
(as I will call him) said in a considering way, going back to some
earlier topic, with a view to keeping up appearances.

"Ah, poor people," said Mrs. Brown, a trifle condescendingly. "My
grandmother had a maid who came when she was fifteen and stayed till she
was eighty" (this was said with a kind of hurt and aggressive pride to
impress us both perhaps).

"One doesn't often come across that sort of thing nowadays," said Mr.
Smith in conciliatory tones.

Then they were silent.

"It's odd they don't start a golf club there--I should have thought one
of the young fellows would," said Mr. Smith, for the silence obviously
made him uneasy.

Mrs. Brown hardly took the trouble to answer.

"What changes they're making in this part of the world," said Mr. Smith
looking out of the window, and looking furtively at me as he did do.

It was plain, from Mrs. Brown's silence, from the uneasy affability with
which Mr. Smith spoke, that he had some power over her which he was
exerting disagreeably. It might have been her son's downfall, or some
painful episode in her past life, or her daughter's. Perhaps she was
going to London to sign some document to make over some property.
Obviously against her will she was in Mr. Smith's hands. I was beginning
to feel a great deal of pity for her, when she said, suddenly and
inconsequently,

"Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for
two years in succession by caterpillars?" She spoke quite brightly, and
rather precisely, in a cultivated, inquisitive voice.

Mr. Smith was startled, but relieved to have a safe topic of
conversation given him. He told her a great deal very quickly about
plagues of insects. He told her that he had a brother who kept a fruit
farm in Kent. He told her what fruit farmers do every year in Kent, and
so on, and so on. While he talked a very odd thing happened. Mrs. Brown
took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes. She
was crying. But she went on listening quite composedly to what he was
saying, and he went on talking, a little louder, a little angrily, as if
he had seen her cry often before; as if it were a painful habit. At last
it got on his nerves. He stopped abruptly, looked out of the window,
then leant towards her as he had been doing when I got in, and said in a
bullying, menacing way, as if he would not stand any more nonsense,

"So about that matter we were discussing. It'll be all right? George
will be there on Tuesday?"

"We shan't be late," said Mrs. Brown, gathering herself together with
superb dignity.

Mr. Smith said nothing. He got up, buttoned his coat, reached his bag
down, and jumped out of the train before it had stopped at Clapham
Junction. He had got what he wanted, but he was ashamed of himself; he
was glad to get out of the old lady's sight.

Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner
opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely.
The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a
draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of--that
overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and
incongruous ideas crowd into one's head on such occasions; one sees the
person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different
scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments:
sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband's medals were
on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the
edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent
stares. The caterpillars and the oak-trees seemed to imply all that. And
then, into this fantastic and secluded life, in broke Mr. Smith. I saw
him blowing in, so to speak, on a windy day. He banged, he slammed. His
dripping umbrella made a pool in the hall. They sat closeted together.

And then Mrs. Brown faced the dreadful revelation. She took her heroic
decision. Early, before dawn, she packed her bag and carried it herself
to the station. She would not let Smith touch it. She was wounded in her
pride, unmoored from her anchorage; she came of gentlefolks who kept
servants--but details could wait. The important thing was to realise her
character, to steep oneself in her atmosphere. I had no time to explain
why I felt it somewhat tragic, heroic, yet with a dash of the flighty,
and fantastic, before the train stopped, and I watched her disappear,
carrying her bag, into the vast blazing station. She looked very small,
very tenacious; at once very frail and very heroic. And I have never
seen her again, and I shall never know what became of her.

The story ends without any point to it. But I have not told you this
anecdote to illustrate either my own ingenuity or the pleasure of
travelling from Richmond to Waterloo. What I want you to see in it is
this. Here is a character imposing itself upon another person. Here is
Mrs. Brown making someone begin almost automatically to write a novel
about her. I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the
corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with
character, and that it is to express character--not to preach doctrines,
sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the
form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic,
and alive, has been evolved. To express character, I have said; but you
will at once reflect that the very widest interpretation can be put upon
those words. For example, old Mrs. Brown's character will strike you
very differently according to the age and country in which you happen to
be born. It would be easy enough to write three different versions of
that incident in the train, an English, a French, and a Russian. The
English writer would make the old lady into a 'character'; he would
bring out her oddities and mannerisms; her buttons and wrinkles; her
ribbons and warts. Her personality would dominate the book. A French
writer would rub out all that; he would sacrifice the individual Mrs.
Brown to give a more general view of human nature; to make a more
abstract, proportioned, and harmonious whole. The Russian would pierce
through the flesh; would reveal the soul--the soul alone, wandering out
into the Waterloo Road, asking of life some tremendous question which
would sound on and on in our ears after the book was finished. And then
besides age and country there is the writer's temperament to be
considered. You see one thing in character, and I another. You say it
means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing each makes a
further selection on principles of his own. Thus Mrs. Brown can be
treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country,
and temperament of the writer.

But now I must recall what Mr. Arnold Bennett says. He says that it is
only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of
surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality?
And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr.
Bennett and quite unreal to me. For instance, in this article he says
that Dr. Watson in _Sherlock Holmes_ is real to him: to me Dr. Watson is
a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun. And so it is with
character after character--in book after book. There is nothing that
people differ about more than the reality of characters, especially in
contemporary books. But if you take a larger view I think that Mr.
Bennett is perfectly right. If, that is, you think of the novels which
seem to you great novels--_War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Tristram Shandy,
Madame Bovary, Pride and Prejudice, The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Villette_--if you think of these books, you do at once think of some
character who has seemed to you so real (I do not by that mean so
lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it
itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes--of religion, of
love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in county towns, of
sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul. There is hardly any
subject of human experience that is left out of _War and Peace_ it seems
to me. And in all these novels all these great novelists have brought us
to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise,
they would not be novelists; but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.

But now let us examine what Mr. Bennett went on to say--he said that
there was no great novelist among the Georgian writers because they
cannot create characters who are real, true, and convincing. And there I
cannot agree. There are reasons, excuses, possibilities which I think
put a different colour upon the case. It seems so to me at least, but I
am well aware that this is a matter about which I am likely to be
prejudiced, sanguine, and near-sighted. I will put my view before you in
the hope that you will make it impartial, judicial, and broad-minded.
Why, then, is it so hard for novelists at present to create characters
which seem real, not only to Mr. Bennett, but to the world at large?
Why, when October comes round, do the publishers always fail to supply
us with a masterpiece?

Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in
1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face--that there was no
English novelist living from whom they could learn their business. Mr.
Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however
admirable, not very helpful. Mr. Hardy has written no novel since 1895.
The most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910 were, I
suppose, Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy. Now it seems to me
that to go to these men and ask them to teach you how to write a
novel--how to create characters that are real--is precisely like going
to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch. Do not
let me give you the impression that I do not admire and enjoy their
books. They seem to me of great value, and indeed of great necessity.
There are seasons when it is more important to have boots than to have
watches. To drop metaphor, I think that after the creative activity of
the Victorian age it was quite necessary, not only for literature but
for life, that someone should write the books that Mr. Wells, Mr.
Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have written. Yet what odd books they are!
Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they
leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and
dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do
something--to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.
That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put
upon the shelf, and need never be read again. But with the work of other
novelists it is different. _Tristram Shandy_ or _Pride and Prejudice_ is
complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire
to do anything, except indeed to read the book again, and to understand
it better. The difference perhaps is that both Sterne and Jane Austen
were interested in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the
book in itself. Therefore everything was inside the book, nothing
outside. But the Edwardians were never interested in character in
itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something
outside. Their books, then, were incomplete as books, and required that
the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself.

Perhaps we can make this clearer if we take the liberty of imagining a
little party in the railway carriage--Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr.
Bennett are travelling to Waterloo with Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown, I have
said, was poorly dressed and very small. She had an anxious, harassed
look. I doubt whether she was what you call an educated woman. Seizing
upon all these symptoms of the unsatisfactory condition of our primary
schools with a rapidity to which I can do no justice, Mr. Wells would
instantly project upon the windowpane a vision of a better, breezier,
jollier, happier, more adventurous and gallant world, where these musty
railway carriages and fusty old women do not exist; where miraculous
barges bring tropical fruit to Camberwell by eight o'clock in the
morning; where there are public nurseries, fountains, and libraries,
dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, and marriages; where every citizen is
generous and candid, manly and magnificent, and rather like Mr. Wells
himself. But nobody is in the least like Mrs. Brown. There are no Mrs.
Browns in Utopia. Indeed I do not think that Mr. Wells, in his passion
to make her what she ought to be, would waste a thought upon her as she
is. And what would Mr. Galsworthy see? Can we doubt that the walls of
Doulton's factory would take his fancy? There are women in that factory
who make twenty-five dozen earthenware pots every day. There are mothers
in the Mile End Road who depend upon the farthings which those women
earn. But there are employers in Surrey who are even now smoking rich
cigars while the nightingale sings. Burning with indignation, stuffed
with information, arraigning civilisation, Mr. Galsworthy would only see
in Mrs. Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner.

Mr. Bennett, alone of the Edwardians, would keep his eyes in the
carriage. He, indeed, would observe every detail with immense care. He
would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth;
the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs. Brown
wore a brooch which had cost three-and-ten-three at Whitworth's bazaar;
and had mended both gloves--indeed the thumb of the left-hand glove had
been replaced. And he would observe, at length, how this was the
non-stop train from Windsor which calls at Richmond for the convenience
of middle-class residents, who can afford to go to the theatre but have
not reached the social rank which can afford motor-cars, though it is
true, there are occasions (he would tell us what), when they hire them
from a company (he would tell us which). And so he would gradually sidle
sedately towards Mrs. Brown, and would remark how she had been left a
little copyhold, not freehold, property at Datchet, which, however, was
mortgaged to Mr. Bungay the solicitor--but why should. I presume to
invent Mr. Bennett? Does not Mr. Bennett write novels himself? I will
open the first book that chance puts in my way--_Hilda Lessways._ Let us
see how he makes us feel that Hilda is real, true, and convincing, as a
novelist should. She shut the door in a soft, controlled way, which
showed the constraint of her relations with her mother. She was fond of
reading _Maud_; she was endowed with the power to feel intensely. So
far, so good; in his leisurely, surefooted way Mr. Bennett is trying in
these first pages, where every touch is important, to show us the kind
of girl she was.

But then he begins to describe, not Hilda Lessways, but the view from
her bedroom window, the excuse being that Mr. Skellorn, the man who
collects rents, is coming along that way. Mr. Bennett proceeds:

"The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky district of
the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost, lay to the
south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in large curves on
its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea. On the
canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a flour-mill, that
sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and the chimneys
closing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a bricked path,
which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their
appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front of Mrs.
Lessways' house. By this path Mr. Skellorn should have arrived, for he
inhabited the farthest of the cottages."

One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of
description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the
novelist. And now--where is Hilda? Alas. Hilda is still looking out of
the window. Passionate and dissatisfied as she was, she was a girl with
an eye for houses. She often compared this old Mr. Skellorn with the
villas she saw from her bedroom window. Therefore the villas must be
described. Mr. Bennett proceeds:

"The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a
district where much of the land was copyhold and could only change
owners subject to the payment of 'fines,' and to the feudal consent of a
'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most of the
dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch
of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter
of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolised the final
triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and
industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary's
dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achievement.
Nevertheless, Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit this."

Heaven be praised, we cry! At last we are coming to Hilda herself. But
not so fast. Hilda may have been this, that, and the other; but Hilda
not only looked at houses, and thought of houses; Hilda lived in a
house. And what sort of a house did Hilda live in? Mr. Bennett proceeds:

"It was one of the two middle houses of a detached terrace of four
houses built by her grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it
was the chief of the four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of
the terrace. One of the corner houses comprised a grocer's shop, and
this house had been robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the
seigneurial garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the other. The
terrace was not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from
twenty-six to thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and
petty insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well
built, generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed
some faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of
houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of
Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior,
wider, more liberal. Suddenly Hilda heard her mother's voice. . . ."

But we cannot hear her mother's voice, or Hilda's voice; we can only
hear Mr. Bennett's voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and
copyholds and fines. What can Mr. Bennett be about? I have formed my own
opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about--he is trying to make us imagine
for him; he is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he
has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his
powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and
humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs.
Brown in her corner. There she sits in the corner of the carriage--that
carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from
one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal,
Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it
is the novelists who get in and out--there she sits and not one of the
Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very
powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at
factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the
carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. And so
they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their
purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their
business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not
our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language. What is a
convention, a tool, you may ask, and what do you mean by saying that Mr.
Bennett's and Mr. Wells's and Mr. Galsworthy's conventions are the
'wrong conventions for the Georgian's? The question is difficult: I will
attempt a short cut. A convention in writing is not much different from
a convention in manners. Both in life and in literature it is necessary
to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her
unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the
other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for generations of
hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal
interest in which we all believe. She begins by saying that we are
having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown
guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest. So it is in literature.
The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him
something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his
imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more
difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that
this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost
instinctively, in the dark, with one's eyes shut. Here is Mr. Bennett
making use of this common ground in the passage which I have quoted. The
problem before him was to make us believe in the reality of Hilda
Lessways. So he began, being an Edwardian, by describing accurately and
minutely the sort of house Hilda lived in, and the sort of house she saw
from the window. House property was the common ground from which the
Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy. Indirect as it seems to
us, the convention worked admirably, and thousands of Hilda Lessways
were launched upon the world by this means. For that age and generation,
the convention was a good one.

But now, if you will allow me to pull my own anecdote to pieces, you
will see how keenly I felt the lack of a convention, and how serious a
matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next.
The incident had made a great impression on me. But how was I to
transmit it to you? All I could do was to report as accurately as I
could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn, to say,
despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my mind, to proceed
to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid, this
overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of
burning. To tell you the truth, I was also strongly tempted to
manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady's son, and his
adventures crossing the Atlantic, and her daughter, and how she kept a
milliner's shop in Westminster, the past life of Smith himself, and his
house at Sheffield, though such stories seem to me the most dreary,
irrelevant, and humbugging affairs in the world.

But if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling effort of
saying what I meant. And to have got at what I meant I should have had
to go back and back and back; to experiment with one thing and another;
to try this sentence and that, referring each word to my vision,
matching it as exactly as possible, and knowing that somehow I had to
find a common ground between us, a convention which would not seem to
you too odd, unreal, and far-fetched to believe in. I admit that I
shirked that arduous undertaking. I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my
fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly
the great Edwardians' fault. I asked them--they are my elders and
betters--How shall I begin to describe this woman's character? And they
said, "Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.
Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year
1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe
calico. Describe----" But I cried, "Stop! Stop!" And I regret to say
that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the
window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico,
my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of
imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished
for ever.

That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong
ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of
things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to
deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they
have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that
novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about
the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it.
Therefore, you see, the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away
the method that was in use at the moment. He was left alone there facing
Mrs. Brown without any method of conveying her to the reader. But that
is inaccurate. A writer is never alone. There is always the public with
him--if not on the same seat, at least in the compartment next door. Now
the public is a strange travelling companion. In England it is a very
suggestible and docile creature, which, once you get it to attend, will
believe implicitly what it is told for a certain number of years. If you
say to the public with sufficient conviction, "All women have tails, and
all men humps," it will actually learn to see women with tails and men
with humps, and will think it very revolutionary and probably improper
if you say "Nonsense. Monkeys have tails and camels humps. But men and
women have brains, and they have hearts; they think and they
feel,"--that will seem to it a bad joke, and an improper one into the
bargain.

But to return. Here is the British public sitting by the writer's side
and saying in its vast and unanimous way, "Old women have houses. They
have fathers. They have incomes. They have servants. They have hot water
bottles. That is how we know that they are old women. Mr. Wells and Mr.
Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy have always taught us that this is the way to
recognise them. But now with your Mrs. Brown--how are we to believe in
her? We do not even know whether her villa was called Albert or
Balmoral; what she paid for her gloves; or whether her mother died of
cancer or of consumption. How can she be alive? No; she is a mere
figment of your imagination."

And old women of course ought to be made of freehold villas and copyhold
estates, not of imagination.

The Georgian novelist, therefore, was in an awkward predicament. There
was Mrs. Brown protesting that she was different, quite different, from
what people made out, and luring the novelist to her rescue by the most
fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms; there were the Edwardians
handing out tools appropriate to house building and house breaking; and
there was the British public asseverating that they must see the hot
water bottle first. Meanwhile the train was rushing to that station
where we must all get out.

Such, I think, was the predicament in which the young Georgians found
themselves about the year 1910. Many of them--I am thinking of Mr.
Forster and Mr. Lawrence in particular--spoilt their early work because,
instead of throwing away those tools, they tried to use them. They tried
to compromise. They tried to combine their own direct sense of the
oddity and significance of some character with Mr. Galsworthy's
knowledge of the Factory Acts, and Mr. Bennett's knowledge of the Five
Towns. They tried it, but they had too keen, too overpowering a sense of
Mrs. Brown and her peculiarities to go on trying it much longer.
Something had to be done. At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to
valuable property Mrs. Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her
high relations to the world before the train stopped and she disappeared
for ever. And so the smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we
hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in
newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling,
crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian
age--rather a melancholy one if you think what melodious days there have
been in the past, if you think of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or
even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens; if you think of the
language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the
same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.

In view of these facts--with these sounds in my ears and these fancies
in my brain--I am not going to deny that Mr. Bennett has some reason
when he complains that our Georgian writers are unable to make us
believe that our characters are real. I am forced to agree that they do
not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity every
autumn. But instead of being gloomy, I am sanguine. For this state of
things is, I think, inevitable whenever from hoar old age or callow
youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication between
writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At
the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no
code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the
more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the
time is so artificial--you have to talk about the weather and nothing
but the weather throughout the entire visit--that, naturally, the feeble
are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very
foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere
apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying
with an aunt for the weekend rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer
desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more adult
writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen.
Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only
that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus, if
you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of
the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr. Joyce's indecency in
_Ulysses_ seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a
desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the
windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But
what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it
is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the
determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! Again,
with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot. I think that Mr. Eliot has written some
of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is
of the old usages and politenesses of society--respect for the weak,
consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and
ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a
dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like
an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess,
for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who,
instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade
with a book. Again, in Mr. Strachey's books, "Eminent Victorians" and
"Queen Victoria," the effort and strain of writing against the grain and
current of the times is visible too. It is much less visible, of course,
for not only is he dealing with facts, which are stubborn things, but he
has fabricated, chiefly from eighteenth-century material, a very
discreet code of manners of his own, which allows him to sit at table
with the highest in the land and to say a great many things under cover
of that exquisite apparel which, had they gone naked, would have been
chased by the men-servants from the room. Still, if you compare "Eminent
Victorians" with some of Lord Macaulay's essays, though you will feel
that Lord Macaulay is always wrong, and Mr. Strachey always right, you
will also feel a body, a sweep, a richness in Lord Macaulay's essays
which show that his age was behind him; all his strength went straight
into his work; none was used for purposes of concealment or of
conversion. But Mr. Strachey has had to open our eyes before he made us
see; he has had to search out and sew together a very artful manner of
speech; and the effort, beautifully though it is concealed, has robbed
his work of some of the force that should have gone into it, and limited
his scope.

For these reasons, then, we must reconcile ourselves to a season of
failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is
spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to
reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen
Victoria, Mr. Prufrock--to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she has
made famous lately--is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her
rescuers reach her. And it is the sound of their axes that we hear--a
vigorous and stimulating sound in my ears--unless of course you wish to
sleep, when, in the bounty of his concern. Providence has provided a
host of writers anxious and able to satisfy your needs.

Thus I have tried, at tedious length, I fear, to answer some of the
questions which I began by asking. I have given an account of some of
the difficulties which in my view beset the Georgian writer in all his
forms. I have sought to excuse him. May I end by venturing to remind you
of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this
business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as
fellow travellers with Mrs. Brown? For she is just as visible to you who
remain silent as to us who tell stories about her. In the course of your
daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting
experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard
scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at
night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day
thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of
emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.
Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of
all this, an image of Mrs. Brown, which has no likeness to that
surprising apparition whatsoever. In your modesty you seem to consider
that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they
know more of Mrs. Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal
mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on
your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and
emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close
and equal alliance between us. Hence spring those sleek, smooth novels,
those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery
criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses
and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time.

Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths
and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any
rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of
unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any
place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what.
But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her
nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination,
for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.

But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory
presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the
fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I
will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction--we are trembling
on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can
only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown.


[Footnote 1: A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18, 1924.]





End of Project Gutenberg's Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, by Virginia Woolf