Virginia Woolf: The Last Phase

Mrs. Woolf, we all know, is a Poet in Prose; or rather she had—at least up to the time of Orlando—a range of sensuous impressions which would have stood a great poet in good stead. But sensuous impressions, though they are immensely important and perhaps the only means whereby a poet can make his apprehensions and his attitudes concrete and comprehensible, are not an end in themselves: if they were, most normally sensitive children would be great poets. Mrs. Woolf was of course adult and an intelligent woman; but, as a reviewer in the Calendar pointed out on the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, her intellectual capacity is oddly disproportionate to, and immature compared with, her sensitiveness, and, if she ventures outside the narrow range imposed on her by nervous sensation, she becomes a child. Since the grasp of experience implicit in sensuous apprehension purely and simply is necessarily so limited, it is perhaps significant that the only occasion when she has been able to use her impressions, in their variously subtle interrelations, to form an organization, a whole, has been when she was concerned, to some extent at least, with personal reminiscence; and it is probable, moreover, that what she did in To the Lighthouse, could be done only once.

In this book, anyway, Mrs. Woolf used her impressions triumphantly as imaginative concepts, and she perfected an original technique to express the order which she apprehended within these impressions. As she is a sensuous artist, and what the senses perceive is transitory and mutable, she saw them as dominated by Time; and she found a central symbol for her theme so just and integral that it is not as oversimple as it may superficially appear to say that what differentiates To the Lighthouse from Mrs. Woolf’s other novels is precisely that in this work alone something really happens—the trip to the lighthouse. And here, because she has kept within her limitations, her conception of human relaionships and of moral values is delicate and sure, graded round the figure of Mrs. Ramsay who has positive life, is compelling and potent. But how limited this conception nonetheless is, is suggested by the somewhat suspicious easiness of the (admittedly very beautiful) middle section, Time Passes: even in this book, where her poetry is so consummately incarnated, her attitude is ultimately that of the “sensitive” young girl who, growing old in years, looks back and remembers.