Books: How Time Passes

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Analogies of the sea haunt Virginia Woolf: "As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass." Virginia Woolf's novels are all attempts to answer the same inexhaustible question: What is the nature of life? "The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it." Few of her admirers, and certainly not Virginia Woolf, would say that any of her books, or even the sum total of them, have supplied an adequate account of the nature of life.

But the majority of her readers would agree that her books, while they do not reveal Reality, do afford an authentic view.

The Writer. Unlike most novelists, Virginia Woolf has written as much criticism as fiction. Even those who do not care for her novels admit that as a critic she is first-rate. In her two Common Readers (collections of critical articles) she has practiced the detachment which Matthew Arnold preached. Her tolerance rarely deserts her except when she writes about literary climbers or timeservers, or about the Edwardian novelists who were her immediate predecessors. Her pet targets are Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, whom she considers hopeless materialists, blind guides of their misled generation. Heaven, to one of Arnold Bennett's characters, she has said, would be "an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton." (Bennett's characteristic retort was that Virginia Woolf's novels "seriously lack vitality.") And of H. G. Wells: "What more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters?" But Virginia Woolf's criticism is usually appreciative. Her critical motto is a quotation from Sam Johnson that echoes her own literary practice: "Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of a whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing."