Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

Virginia Woolf, Delphi Classics

• Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788771030
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

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Chapter One

Your mother was born in 1879, and as some six years at least must have passed before I knew that she was my sister, I can say nothing of that time. A photograph is the best token there is of her appearance, and the face in this instance shows also much of the character. You see the soft, dreamy and almost melancholy expression of the eyes; and it may not be fanciful to discover some kind of test and rejection in them as though, even then, she considered the thing she saw, and did not always find what she needed in it. But certainly it would be mere fancy to conceive that this was other than unconscious at that age. For the rest, a mother who gazed in her face might feel her heart leap at the endowment already promised her daughter, for she was to have great beauty. And in this case the mother would also feel tender joy within her, and some bright amusement too, for already her daughter promised to be honest and loving; already, as I have heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she was, teaching Thoby his letters, and giving up to him her bottle. I can imagine that she attached great importance to the way in which Thoby sat in his highchair, and appealed to Nurse to have him properly fastened there before he was allowed to eat his porridge. Her mother would smile silently at this.

Our life was ordered with great simplicity and regularity. It seems to divide itself into two large spaces, not crowded with events, but in some way more exquisitely natural than any that follow; for our duties were very plain and cur pleasures absolutely appropriate. Earth gave all the satisfaction we asked. One space was spent indoors, in the drawing room and nursery, and the other in Kensington Gardens. There were a number of little warfares, and sometimes Nessa and Thoby fought with us and sometimes they were our friends. I remember too the great extent and mystery of the dark land under the nursery table, where a continuous romance seemed to go forward, though the time spent there was really so short. Here I met your mother, in a gloom happily encircled by the firelight, and peopled with legs and skirts. We drifted together like ships in an immense ocean and she asked me whether black cats had tails. And I answered that they had not, after a pause in which her question seemed to drop echoing down vast abysses, hitherto silent. In future I suppose there was some consciousness between us that the other held possibilities. But though shot occasionally by stormy passions, when sympathies seemed to waken beyond the reach of circumstances, the great satisfaction was to be had from impersonal things. There were smells and flowers and dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, and each had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second. There were long summer evenings, with white moths abroad; and bright winter evenings when the fire-wood could be cut into shape. “The others” were not brothers and sister, but beings possessed of knives, or enviable gifts for running or carving; and your mother, partly because she did not seem to hold these views as completely as we did, was the first to disturb me from my contentment. Another influence was even then astir in her, the influence of an affection only to be gratified by people. No hole dug in the gardens however deep, so that it was possible to extract clay of a malleable quality from it, gave her all that she needed. Dolls did not satisfy her. At present, until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she would lament her “responsibilities”. Other children had their stages, and sudden gifts and failings; she seemed to draw on steadily, as though with her eye on some far object, which attained, she might reveal herself. She was very silent, and the only peculiar tastes which she seemed encouraged to show were those that people called out; she cried when Thoby went to school, and she minded more than the rest when your grandmother declared with some passion and humour, as I think, that she could never trust a single one of us again; had we not gone hunting for a dead cat against her commands? But beneath the serious surface only legitimately broken by such affections, there burnt also the other passion, the passion for art. She drew indeed under the care of a Mr Cook, but talk of art, talk of her own gifts and loves, was unknown to her. What did she think then? For with her long fingers grouping, and her eye considering, she surely painted many pictures without a canvas. Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. “When I am a famous painter—” she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way. And when she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. “They’ve given me the thing — I don’t know why.”

“What thing?”

“O they say I’ve won it — the book — the prize you know.” She was awkward as a long-legged colt.

When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health — the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate self expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest”, to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.

So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon her to be what people call ‘practical’ though a generous talent for losing umbrellas and forgetting messages showed that nature sometimes delighted to laugh at the pretence. But the power which was not feigned and was probably recognized by those who trusted her, was what I call variously sagacity, and common sense, and more rightly perhaps, honesty of mind. She might not see all, but she would not see what was not there. Stories, shallow though they seem, and I cannot be sure that to other eyes they will show what they show to mine, float upon the surface and must be made to illustrate this flying narrative. One August night, very much later in date, when your grandmother was dead we walked in the garden at Ringwood. Your grandfather sat indoors alone, and might at any moment call us in to play whist with him as usual; and the light and the cards and the shouting seemed to us that night too crude and close to be tolerable. So we walked in the shade, and when we heard him come to the window and call we stood silent. Then he came out onto the lawn, and peered round him and called us each by name.

But still we persisted, and at length he went in and left us to walk alone. But as we knew from the first perhaps, such joy is not for mortals; we wandered without delight, and at last went in and found him impressive, consciously but truly impressive, old, solitary and deserted. “Did you hear me call?” he said, and I was silent, and so was Adrian; your mother hesitated, and then said “Yes”.

But this shows her quality in a tragic light; exposed to the fiercest strain. In earlier years it was most often the characteristic laughable token by which we knew her; “Old Nessa’s honesty” or “The Old Creature is so matter-of-fact” or “She means well”. For sometimes she clung to truth too tenaciously, too simply; and we, flippant or sometimes insolent, persecuted her with horrid titles, ‘Saint’, and so on; for children so soon as they have any wit to direct are apt to use it cruelly. But there were then days of pure enjoyment — I conceive them at St Ives most readily, when your mother trotted about on various businesses, considering the characters and desires of dogs very gravely, skilfully contriving butterfly nets, under your Uncle Waller’s tuition, accepting his law as the divine law, painting in water-colours, and scratching a number of black little squares, after Ruskin’s prescription. She played cricket better for the same reasons, with her straight forward stroke, calculated to meet all emergencies; and began by means of such fidelity and outward simplicity to win respect for herself from those tyrants and demigods who ruled our world; George, Waller, and Madge Symonds.§ She was a happy creature! beginning to feel within her the spring of unsuspected gifts, that the sea was beautiful and might be painted some day, and perhaps once or twice she looked steadily in the glass when no one was by and saw a face that excited her strangely; her being began to have a definite shape, a place in the world — what was it like? But her natural development, in which the artistic gift, so sensitive and yet so vigorous, would have asserted itself, was checked; the effect of death upon those that live is always strange, and often terrible in the havoc it makes with innocent desires.

In this sense your grandmother’s death was disastrous; for you must conceive that she was not only the most beautiful of women as her portraits will tell you, but also one of the most distinct. Her life had been so swift, it was to be so short, that experiences which in most have space to expand themselves and bear leisurely fruit, were all compressed in her; she had married, borne children, and mourned her husband by the time she was twenty-four. For eight years she pondered that active season, and as I guess, formulated then in great part the judgement of life which underlay her future. She had been happy as few people are happy, for she had passed like a princess in a pageant from her supremely beautiful youth to marriage and motherhood, without awakenment. If I read truly, indeed the atmosphere of her home flattered such dreams and cast over the figure of her bridegroom all the golden enchantments of Tennysonian sentiment. But it would need a clearer vision than mine to decide how far her husband, though now so obviously her inferior in all ways, was able then to satisfy noble and genuine passions in his wife. Perhaps she made satisfaction for herself, cloaking his deficiencies in her own superabundance. At any rate when he was dead she determined to consecrate those years as the golden ones; when as she phrased it perhaps, she had not known the sorrow and the crime of the world because she had lived with a man, stainless of his kind, exalted in a world of pure love and beauty. The effect of his death then was doubly tremendous, because it was disillusionment as well as a tragic human loss. She had by nature a keen brain, remorseless of all insincerity and even too much inclined to insist that all feeling has an equivalent in action or is worthless. And now that she had none to worship she worshipped the memory, and looking on the world with clear eyes, was more scornful than was just of its tragedy and stupidity because she had lived in a dream and still cherished a dream. She flung aside her religion, and became, as I have heard, the most positive of disbelievers. She reversed those natural instincts which were so strong in her of happiness and joy in a generous and abundant life, and pressed the bitterest fruit only to her lips. She visited the poor, nursed the dying, and felt herself possessed of the true secret of life at last, which is still obscured from a few, though they too must come to know it, that sorrow is our lot, and at best we can but face it bravely. All these things certainly she would have learnt had her husband lived, but learnt them with wisdom and temperance, delighting, rejoicing in the exercise of her own gifts and in the enjoyment of blessings which, surely, were not singular. But it would be easy to exaggerate the significance of this attitude, for much of its crudeness came, not from native harshness, but from the mutilation which her natural growth had undergone. Slowly, as I believe, she came to exercise her mind, and sadly enough to determine that much of the interest of the world must come in future from the satisfaction of her intellect. She saw many clever people, and read with a desire to establish her own sad faith, the works of disbelievers who spelt God without a capital G. In particular she read some early articles by your grandfather and liked them better than she liked him.

Fate, who is thought by some to arrange human lives to her liking, chose that your grandfather, with his first wife, should live in the same street with your grandmother and further decreed that Minny was to die there, and that your grandmother thus should be thrown into contact with her learned and formidable friend under the conditions which she of all people felt most poignantly. Would any other arrangement of circumstances have so brought about the miracle? For she found one who had equal reasons with herself to believe in the sorrow of life and every incentive to adopt her own stoic philosophy; he also was of the giant breed, no light lover, no superficial optimist. She might go hand in hand with him through the shadows of the Valley — but, of a sudden, her companion became her guide, pointed on, urged her to follow, to hope, to strive once more. She could not so soon throw off what had come to be a habit of suffering almost, and yet his reason was the stronger, his need was the greater. At length with pain and remorse she, courageous as she was, more truly courageous perhaps than her husband, bade herself face the truth and realize in all its aspects the fact that joy was to be endured as well as sorrow. She rose to the heights, wide-eyed and nobly free from all illusion or sentiment, her second love shining pure as starlight; the rosy mists of the first rapture dispelled for ever. Indeed it is notable that she never spoke of her first love; and in treasuring it changed it perhaps to something far fairer than it could have been, had life allowed it to endure. The second marriage was the true though late fulfilment of all that she could be; and, but that it was rather late, rather crowded, and rather anxious, no match was more truly equal, or more ceaselessly valiant. Large words, perhaps, to use of fifteen years! with all their opportunity for smallness, failure, tolerance of mediocrity. But, although there were certain matters which seem to us now decided by her too much in a spirit of compromise, and exacted by him without strict regard for justice or magnanimity, still it is true whether you judge by their work or by themselves that it was a triumphant life, consistently aiming at high things.

These circumstances had taken their part in forming your grandmother’s character; and by the time we, her children, knew her, she was the most prompt, practical and vivid of human beings. It was as though she had made up her mind definitely upon certain great matters and was never after troubled to consider herself at all; but every deed and word had the bright, inexorable, swift stamp of something struck clearly by a mass of hoarded experience. Four children were born to her; there were four others already, older, demanding other care; she taught us, was their companion, and soothed, cheered, inspired, nursed, deceived your grandfather; and any one coming for help found her invincibly upright in her place, with time to give, earnest consideration, and the most practical sympathy. Her relations with people indeed were all through her life remarkable; and after her second marriage this decision, of which I speak, seemed to make her spend herself more freely than ever in the service of others. And as that phrase has a doubtful reputation, and might well lead you to imagine a different woman from the real one, I must explain that her conduct in this matter was singular, and by no means of a piece with the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results.

Her view of the world had come to be very comprehensive; she seemed to watch, like some wise Fate, the birth, growth, flower and death of innumerable lives all round her, with a constant sense of the mystery that encircled them, not now so sceptical as of old, and [with] a perfectly definite idea of the help that was possible and of use. Her intellectual gifts had always been those that find their closest expression in action; she had great clearness of insight, sound judgement, humour, and a power of grasping very quickly the real nature of someone’s circumstances, and so arranging that the matter, whatever it was, fell into its true proportions at once. Sometimes with her natural impetuosity, she took it on herself to despatch difficulties with a high hand, like some commanding Empress. But most often I think her service, when it was not purely practical, lay in simply helping people by the light of her judgement and experience, to see what they really meant or felt. But any sensible woman may have these qualities, and yet be none of the things that your grandmother was. All her gifts had something swift, decisive, witty even, in their nature; so that there could be no question of dulness or drudgery in her daily work, however lugubrious it seemed of itself. She was sensitive by temperament and impatient of stupidity; and while she was there the whole of that interminable and incongruous procession which is the life of a large family, went merrily; with exquisite humour in its incidents very often, or something grotesque or impressive in its arrangement, perpetually lit up by her keen attention, her amazing sense of the life that is in the weakest or most threadbare situations. She stamped people with characters at once; and at St Ives, or on Sunday afternoons at Hyde Park Gate, the scene was often fit for the stage; boldly acting on her conception she drew out from old General Beadle, or C. B. Clarke, or Jack Hills, or Sidney Lee, such sparks of character as they have never shown to anyone since. All lives directly she crossed them seemed to form themselves into a pattern and while she stayed each move was of the utmost importance. But she was no aesthetic spectator, collecting impressions for her own amusement.

Life rather had taught her that facts, as she interpreted them, were by themselves of supreme importance; it was a matter of anxious moment to her that Lisa Stillman should like her brother-in-law, or that a workman wounded in an accident should find healthy employment. She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep; she seemed, if anything, a little indiscriminate in her choice of friends; but bores and fools have their moments. And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; but also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.

Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke, I can see her, standing by the open door of a railway carriage which was taking Stella and some others to Cambridge, and striking out in a phrase or two pictures of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she kept them laughing till the train went.

What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. “Come children,” she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, “Quick, quick”. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds, and into some dingy train or omnibus, where perhaps she would ask the conductor why the company did not give him straw to stand on— “Your feet must be cold” — and hear his story and make her comment, until we were home just in time for lunch. “Don’t keep father waiting.” And at lunch in answer to some languid question, “So those young people are gone? Well, I don’t envy ‘em”, she would have her little story to tell, or perhaps her cryptic phrase which we could not interpret, but knew from the shrugs and “Perhaps” that it bore on one of those romances which they both loved to discuss. The relationship between your grandfather and mother was, as the saying is, perfect, nor would I for a moment dispute that, believing as I do that each of these much tried and by no means easy-going people found in the other the highest and most perfect harmony which their natures could respond to. Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. But, if I can convey my meaning by the metaphor, the high consonance, the flute voices of two birds in tune, was only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity. After all she was fifteen years the younger, and his age was made emphatic by the keen intellect, always voyaging, as she must have thought, alone in ice-bound seas. Her pride in it was like the pride of one in some lofty mountain peak, visited only by the light of the stars, and the rain of snow; it was enthusiastic, but very humble.

She delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him. But she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s. Thus in those moments, breathing spaces in the incessant conflict, when each rested secure for a second in the other’s embrace, she knew with just but always delighted pride, that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high as the lofty remote peak which she honoured in him. And each sprang rejoicing to do homage to qualities unlike their own — how sweet, released from the agony and loneliness of thought to recognize inst...