Books: Inspired Breathlessness

THE COMMON READER, FIRST AND SECOND SERIES (627 pp.)—Virginia Woolf— Harcourt, Brace ($4).

THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS (240 pp.) — Virginia Woolf — Harcourt, Brace ($3).

“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

—To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf was always straining the fine muscles of her mind by grappling—politely, as a lady should—with such ultimate problems. She never solved them, of course; but she struck more matches “unexpectedly in the dark” than most of her contemporaries.

Virginia Woolf appreciated the massive social novels of Fielding and Thackeray, but they did not even write about the questions that interested her. She sought to penetrate beyond the appearances of daily experience to the inner core of life. For this she employed three essential symbols : Time, Space and the Sea, the perennial aspects of life’s hazy patterns. By concentrating all of her attention on a moment’s experience she tried to detect its ties with the past, its anticipation of the future. And while she could not answer the questions she posed, she found in the sea, with its recurring waves, a mirror of the ultimate reality of human existence.

In her essays Virginia Woolf approached writers of the past and present with the same questions in mind. She wrote about Jane Austen’s conscience, Defoe’s advanced attitude toward women and Sterne’s troublesome ghost. She probed the minds of writers as different as Montaigne and Ring Lardner—and brought them all to quickened life; she made them seem contemporaries.

Though the subject that concerned her had no limits, she had. Although she was always troubled by the fear of madness (it led her to commit suicide), she never felt at home with the writers of despair or abnormality.

It would be hard to find, in this day of soggy prose and involuted criticism, another modern essayist who yields such constant pleasure. (She wrote, said E. M. Forster, with “inspired breathlessness.”) Unlike so many American critics who seem intent on smothering their readers with erudition, Virginia Woolf wrote as if she were conversing with friends. To read her essays at one sitting is too much of a good thing; they then seem a bit boneless and soft, their smoothness too consistently stylized. But taken one at a time, as they were written to be read, they are rare works of art, and establish one of the most pleasurable of human relationships: warm kinship between civilized writer and reader.