TWO LESSER LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: STELLA BENSON AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
Miss Stella Benson and Mrs. Virginia Woolf are young women who have
come to the fore very rapidly. The former, who lived in this country
for two years after the war, published in 1915, when she was barely
out of her teens, a novel called “I Pose” which revealed an unusual
personality with an uncommon outlook on life, and an enviable capacity
to describe what she saw, felt, and fabricated. Until the appearance
of her last novel it might be said that she created types which
symbolised her ideas and attitudes and gave expression to them through
conveniently devised situations, rather than attempting to paint models
from life and placing them in a realistic environment.
“I Pose” is a story of allegorical cast lightened with flashes of
whimsical sprightliness. A pensive Gardener who likes to pose as
“original,” a Suffragette who disguises romance under a mask of
militancy, a practical girl, Courtesy, and a number of others take
an ocean voyage and have many adventures, at the end of which the
Suffragette and the Gardener find themselves in love, just as any other
young people who had been dancing and playing tennis, instead of posing
as individuals with convictions.
For the setting of her two succeeding books, “This is the End,” and
“Living Alone,” Miss Benson created a world of her own, and in a
foreword to the latter book she says:
“This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people,
nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the
world so many real books already written for the benefit of real
people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot
believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the
magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a
trespasser.”
Her world is not the traditional fairyland of the nursery, nor are the
supernatural endowments of some of the characters the classic equipment
of witches and fairies, although her _dramatis personæ_ include both
who function under the law of Magic. Rather is her dramatic machinery
in these books a vehicle in the form of a sort of delicate symbolism
for getting over a very sane attitude toward certain social foibles and
trends of today. Incidentally it gives her opportunity of expressing
this attitude in frequent witticisms and epigrammatic sayings for which
she has a gift. In “Living Alone” social service and organised charity
are the targets for her irony. She says,
“Perception goes out of committees. The more committees you
belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When
your daily round becomes nothing more than a round of committees
you might as well be dead ... organizing work consists of
sitting in 'busses bound for remote quarters of London, and
ringing the bells of people who are almost always found to be
away for a fortnight.”
So after Sarah Brown, whose work consists of
“sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence
from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after
wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down
very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might
have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience,”
eats the magic sandwiches which the witch has given her for her lunch,
the scales fall from her eyes. “I am sentimental,” she says to herself.
[Illustration: STELLA BENSON]
“It is sentimental to feel personal affection for a Case, or to
give a child of the Naughty Poor a penny without full enquiry,
or to say 'a-goo' to a grey pensive baby eating dirt on the
pavement ... or in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of
charity and love.”
She resigns her “job” and her place on the committees and goes to live
in the House of Living Alone.
In other words, Miss Benson gives the artist in her what is called
“rope.” She doesn't ask herself, “Will people think I am mad, or
infantile?” She doesn't care what “people think.” And that is an
encouraging sign. Women writers will come to their estates more
quickly and securely the more wholeheartedly they abandon themselves
to portraying instincts as they experience them, behaviour as they
observe it, motives and conduct as they sense and encounter them,
accomplishments and aspirations as they idealise them, the ideals being
founded, like the chances of race horses, on past performances.
In her last novel, “The Poor Man,” Miss Benson's art shows tremendous
development. This story is characterisation in the finest sense.
Edward, the poor man, as a psychological study, is living, vivid,
almost tragically real in the reactions which betray his inherent
defects--a poor devil who never gets a chance. Miss Benson preaches
no sermon, points no moral, makes no plea. She gives us a slice of
life--and gives it relentlessly, but justly. It is the Old Testament
justice which visits the iniquity of the father upon the third and
fourth generations, and leaves the reader with the congenial task of
finishing the sentence by supplying the mercy without which this old
world could hardly totter under the weight of this Commandment. The
story, however, makes no reference either to eugenics or to religion.
The application is for the reader to supply--if he is so inclined.
The author is not concerned with “science,” but with art. She does
not bore us with a history of Edward's heredity or of his early life.
She introduces him to us sitting in Rhoda Romero's room in San
Francisco--an unwelcome guest--without throwing light upon his previous
existence, except that he had been “shell-shocked” and had experienced
three air raids in London.
From his introduction we know Edward as we know an acquaintance, not
as we know ourselves. His tragedy is his feeble mentality and still
feebler temperament, and the heart of the tragedy is the contrast
between his intentions and his acts. Edward always means well. He is
not vicious; not lazy. But he is stupid. He wants to be decent; wants
to be liked; even wants to work. He is weak, sickly, drinks too much,
and there is nothing he knows how to do well. It is as a victim, rather
than as an aggressive wrong-doer, that we see him secretly currying
favour with school-boys he is supposed to be teaching, and ignoring
their insults, selling what belongs to others, and at last robbing a
boy of thirteen who has been left alone by his father in a hotel in
Pekin, whence Edward has gone in headlong and blind pursuit of Emily,
with whom he has become infatuated without even knowing her name. But
such is the art of his delineator that one finds oneself almost pitying
him when his infatuation climaxes in the declaration from Emily: “Can't
you leave me alone? I can't bear you. I couldn't bear to touch you--you
poor sickly thing.” It is on this note that the drama ends.
If one were obliged to confine himself to backing one entry in the
Fiction Sweepstakes now being run in England (entries limited to women
above ten and under forty), he would do well to consider carefully the
Stella Benson entry. Many would back Sheila Kaye-Smith, but the expert
and seasoned bettor would be likely to find so many characteristics of
the plough-horse that he would not waste his money.
Had Rose Macaulay not succumbed to smartness and become enslaved by
epigram, her chances would have been excellent. As it is, she attempts
to carry too much weight. The committee, the literary critics, have
done what they could to lighten it, but “Mystery at Geneva” is her
answer.
E. M. Delafield, Clemence Dane, and even G. B. Stern would be selected
by many, no doubt. But judged from their record, not on form, they
cannot be picked as winners.
The entry that is most likely to get place, if it doesn't win, is the
youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Virginia Woolf.
“Mark on the Wall,” her most important story, deals with the flood
of thought, conscious and unconscious, when so-called abstraction
is facilitated by intent gazing. The hypnotist anæsthetises the
consciousness by having the subject gaze at some bright object, she by
gazing at a snail. The illusion facilitates thought of the place and
of the lives that have been lived there. The richness of the thought
stream thus induced gives full play for her facility of expression and
capacity for pen pictures.
There is in Mrs. Woolf a note of mysticism, of spirituality which
reveals itself in a conscious or unconscious prayer for the elusive
truth. This note of itself sets her apart from the realistic woman
writers of today. Although often vividly realistic in her form, there
is in her work an essence which escapes the bounds of realism. This is
most strongly acknowledged in “Monday or Tuesday,” a volume of short
stories and sketches. The book takes its name from a little sketch of
three hundred and fifty words, for which the only accurate label is
“prose poem.” It is a direct illustration of the author's meaning when
she makes her hero say, in “The Voyage Out”:
“You ought to write music.... Music goes straight for things.
It says all there is to say at once. In writing it seems to me
there's so much scratching on the match-box.”
For prose writing “Monday or Tuesday” is a triumph in the elimination
of “scratching on the match-box.” One recognises in it the longing,
more or less vaguely felt by all people, but inexpressible by most
of them who are not poets, musicians, or artists in form or colour,
for some supreme good which she calls truth. The New Psychology
would attribute it to the unconscious and call it an ugly name. But
Mrs. Woolf does not name it; she merely gives voice to the aspiration
welling up from somewhere in people's deeper selves and hovering
hauntingly, just out of range but near enough to colour the quality of
their thoughts, even when they are occupied with the most trivial and
commonplace business of life. They can never elude it, any more than
they can long elude the “Hound of Heaven,” but unlike the latter it
is not a relentless pursuer, but a lovely, tantalising wraith--always
present but never attainable or definable.
In “An Unwritten Novel,” in the same collection, Mrs. Woolf again
reveals a power of discernment, as well as the irony which is a part of
her large human sympathy, in the conclusion of the story, which opens
with:
“Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make
one's eyes slide over the paper's edge to the poor woman's
face--insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human
destiny with it.”
During a railway journey the writer makes up a novel to fit the face
of the old woman opposite her--a story of an old maid whom life had
cheated, thwarted, and denied all expression of sex, and left her
embittered, resentful, envious, and starved.
“They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret--her
sex, they'd say--the scientific people. But what flummery to
saddle her with sex!”
When she reaches her destination the old woman is met by her son--and
the “story” remains unwritten.
In “A Society,” Mrs. Woolf shies a few brick-bats--and well-aimed
ones--at modern feminism. Her gesture is, however, more one of the
irresistible impulse of the humourist to enjoy herself than any
intention to do serious violence.
The members of the Society, who are a number of young girls bent upon
self-education and believing that the object of life is to produce
good people and good books, find themselves as a result of their
investigations forced to acknowledge that if they hadn't learned to
read they might still have been bearing children in ignorance, and that
was the happiest life after all. By their learning they have sacrificed
both their happiness and their ability to produce good people, and they
are confronted, moreover, with the awful thought that if men continue
to acquire knowledge they will lose their ability to produce good books.
“Unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall
get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath
the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being
will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare.”
The Society disbands with the conclusion that when a little girl has
learned how to read “there's only one thing you can teach her to
believe in--and that is in herself.”
“Kew Gardens” is as vivid a picture as if it had been painted in
colour, of the public gardens on a hot summer day, with their
procession of varied humanity, old, young, and in the flush of life,
each flashing for a moment with all of its own intense personality,
like a figure in a cinema, before the reader, and then passing into
the shadow as vague as the breath of the flowers, the buzzing of the
dragon-fly, or the memories which for a moment the garden had invoked.
The two novels, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, and “Night and
Day,” in 1919, are love stories in which, through the efforts of the
lovers to find and express themselves, the author reveals her own ideas
of life. Her machinery is largely that of dialogue between the lovers,
and her chief actors are normal young men and women, wholesome in their
outlook, as well as frank in their expression of their problems, which
revolve largely around matrimony. The result is that while the novels
are introspective in a way, as well as daring in their analysis of
the author's psychology, they are free from the morbidness of many of
the introspective books of today. “The Voyage Out” is the expression
of healthy, normal youth reverently but straightforwardly seeking in
marriage the deeper values that underlie its superficialities and
justify the quality of its idealism.
In no more striking and creditable way have the women of Britain
demonstrated the legitimacy of “Rights” than by their fiction of the
past few years.